


We Are No Ordinary Stars

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Age Difference, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Canon, Armitage Hux is an officer and a gentleman, Breeding, Comeplay, Daddy/little dynamics, Domesticity, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Grooming, He is also a mother fucking badass who knows what he’s about, Healing, Knotting, Nesting, Playtime, Romance, Size Difference, Smut, Underage - Freeform, What even is feminism?, heat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2019-10-10 06:58:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17421200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: Armitage Hux never much cared for his designation. The savage, chest-beating, rut-driven mania of Alpha life had always seemed rather a bother.Until he met her.





	1. Velveteen Ewok

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, dovies : )
> 
> I'm taking a little break from PDP, and the Sith life in general (just a little one), and I have to say I've been blown *away* by the talent in this corner of the Star Wars comm, for this unique and beautiful pairing. 
> 
> Here's my ragamuffin submission - a loosely cobbled plot set in a bastard A/B/O canonverse, in which Rey is not a Jedi. Do please mind the tags, darlings. 
> 
> Love, Pastel

In hindsight, he would blame his folly on fatigue.

Since the slaying of Skywalker and the final crush of the Galaxy’s would-be insurrectors, Armitage found himself under an avalanche of diplomatic duties. If he wasn’t begging pardon of political allies for another impromptu beheading of an attaché by that insufferable Sith, then he was approving seating charts for state dinners, chairing civil mandate committee meetings, negotiating imperial contracts for fuel reserves and ration prices, or attending a summit on any number of Galactic concerns.

And then of course, there were the riots.

Nevertheless, he’d left the office earlier than usual this evening, having made a promise he was keen to keep.

She met him at the door, prettier than a picture in her soft gray shift and her hair tied up by pink ribbon into a trio of wobbly buns. Before he could step over the threshold, she leapt up into his arms, a warm, wriggling flurry of happy yips and plush kisses and wet little tongue.

“Ahm’tage!” she chirped, “You’re back! You’re really back!”

“So it seems,” he murmured, nuzzling the upturned tip of her nose and along her scent glands.

Marking, always marking…

She smelled so sweet, like innocence and yearning. And cake icing.

“Are we goin’ to start?” she whined softly, even as she cricked her neck to bare her gland to his attentions. “Ahm’tage, you said-”

“Well that depends, cherished,” he hitched her higher, so that they were eye-to-eye. His glinted with mirth. “Is it all set?”

Her ecstatic yips and frantic squirming to get down had been his answer.

Which is how he’d landed up on the living room carpet with the coffee table pushed aside, still dressed in his uniform, stretched elegantly alongside her meticulous rows of _cozies_ , playing the most pivotal role.

And bungling it spectacularly.

He realizes his grave misstep a heartbeat too late when, against all his training and better instincts, he maneuvers her champion cozie, the velveteen ewok, into an empty three-sided porridge carton that serves as the living room saloon.

Her reprimand comes as a sudden, startled shriek.

“Ahm’tage!” her little trio of buns bobble as she slaps the carpet and bares her tiny teeth, “you _aren’t_ ‘posed to move that one yet!”

She’s sitting on her heels in his officer’s jacket, her tiny fingers swallowed by its cuffs, the delicate diamond on her married hand winking demurely against the light. Her miniature replication of Nima Outpost spans the flat valley between them, and at his feet, carefully arranged sofa cushions make a clever model of the Great Northern Dunes. His kit has an eye for detail.

Which is how he knows he's thoroughly in the wrong.

“Forgive me, dearest,” where he’s propped up on his elbow, he defers with a bow of his head.

“He hasn’t met his lady,” she pouts, scooping up his counterpart’s would-be bride. It is one of his dark regimental socks stuffed with tissue paper and sealed with a knot at its open end. Two mismatched button eyes have been sewn to its toe-line. His crescent-shaped medal, _Exceptional bravery in the line of duty,_ if he recalls, makes its smiling mouth.

She cradles it cherishingly to her chest, patting its heel as if to shush it. “If he doesn’ go to the market square, he’ll miss her forever.”

The market square is at the heart of the valley, demarked by his smart black cap. Surrounding it is the hustle-and-bustle of desert life, shoe-brush beasts of burden led by their mismatched masters – a hair bow, his cologne bottle, and a fork missing its tines – all supervised by their cruel chief of ceremonies, the nefarious Master Plutt. A poddy little loofa sponge with beady tack-eyes and no mouth.

A ragtag assembly of actors, to be sure.

He makes a note to purchase more companions for her next time he’s off-ship as he trots her velvet prince into the center of market to meet his lady love.

“That wouldn’t do a’tall, would it?” he murmurs, watching intently her face behind his upturned jacket collar.

It’s silent in the apartment, except for their play. The vents in the ceiling whisper unintelligibly as they cycle air through the rooms. He can scent her, her gland and her sex, and the faint tinge of anxiety underneath all that, as her hands tighten desperately around the sock-maiden, making her paper innards crinkle.

He thinks of the little kitling he found hurt and hiding from bandits beneath her speeder bike. His heart wrings at the memory as he ducks his head to catch her big, beautiful eyes, a little lost-looking now under the low light of the table lamps. “Rey, my love. What is it?”

“Did ‘e forget her?” her voice is warbling and heartbreakingly small.

He smells her tears, unshed and glossy under the light.

“No, never,” he shakes his head, “He… simply stepped away for a bit.”

“Away?”

“Into the saloon to-” he has no talent for improv, but for her, he rallies, “inquire. About a room. For the two of them.”

Her head cocks. This is _wildly_ off-script. “A room?”

“Yes, you see,” he makes the ewok tuck one of its velvety paws behind his back, as the other gesticulates, “General Paddington is a principled ewok-”

She snorts, peeking slyly at his charade through her lashes.

“However, upon glimpsing his lovely lady-” he tries not to look too dubiously at the sock’s button eye that’s come loose and drooping, “he realizes he can deny his desire for her no longer.”

Her breath catches, as her whole face transforms with childish romanticism. She bounces on her heels tucked neatly under her precious little bottom. “Really?”

“He has to have her,” the meaning in his cool blue eyes becomes explicit as they meet hers over the marketplace, “Tonight.”

“S’love at first sight,” she marvels, dimples on kilowatt.

“It certainly was,” he agrees in a timber which is unmistakable, even to a kitling.

Her cheeks flush. She leans her fists on her knees with her dolly pressed beneath them and breathes, “Because she’s so sexable?”

His lips twitch. He reaches slowly to tuck back a bit of her hair.

“Because she is everything.”

He hasn’t braced for the volley of emphatic smooches the sock-maiden bestows upon her captain and savior in the market square. His counterpart is bowled over, lying prone and overwhelmed.

“Oh I love you, General Paddy-ton!” Rey crows in the most ludicrous voice. Like a hoarse hundred-year-old woman. “I love you so much!”

“And I, you, Miss CC-8. And I, you.”


	2. Favorite Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Any day spent with you is my favorite day. So, today is my new favorite day."
> 
> \- Winnie the Pooh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please read the tags <3

Rey hums to herself as she bobbles barefoot about their tiny utility kitchen, mounding an assortment of wheat toasts slathered in honey and cut into clever shapes, fresh fruit slices and berries, pale wedges of cheese and rolled grafts of smoky meat into a delicate heap on her Alpha’s plate. She’s dressed only in one of his stark dress shirts, its starched collar flipped up so that his scent is right under her nose when she turns her cheek to nuzzle. Her hair is slicked neatly into her customary treble of buns, she is _showered_ , as he calls it.

 _“Refreshing!”_ she pipes smartly whenever she steps out of the shower, standing with her chin lilted in the air just the way he does, as he towels her little body down vigorously. He always huffs at that, a quarter-laugh, his cold eyes creasing warmly at the corners. His breath is so hot on her skin.

_Alpha._

Today is Saturday.

Rey likes Saturdays.

Alpha stays home.

“Ahm-tage!” she rings out like a bell, like she’s calling across the endless Great Dunes of the Northern Desert. Like she’s calling across the Galaxy. “Ahm-taaaage!”

He answers quietly, curtly, from the table directly behind her, “Yes, my dove?”

_My dove._

She smiles smugly as she sings, “Bref-fast is ready!” and turns carefully with her offerings, on her tiptoes, so’s not to spill.

 _Oh,_ she tries not to frown, or to sigh, or to laugh when she spies him.

Her Alpha is very unhandsomeable.

His skin is unlike any creature’s she’s ever seen before, white as nightworms and feathered wherever it’s thin with thick blue veins. His lashes are almost as pale, like threads of sunlight, and his eyes-

His eyes are like the Jakku sky, that violent, almost colorless blue into which all things disappear.

 _He is danger,_ she thinks proudly, admiring him. He looks particularly vicious today, dressed sharply in a black dress shirt, dark vest and crisp slacks. He’s wearing a tie.

She’d be anxious that meant he was going out – away from her – but that’s just how he dresses. She knows that now, seeing as she’s lived with him ‘xactly eleven weeks. If the tiny marks she ticks with the ever-dulling tack of his best cuff links along their headboard add up correctly. She’s positive they do. She _can_ count.

 _“Is each of those for a time I’ve_ mounted _you?”_ he teased one morning, leaning and squinting at them as he knotted his tie. _“Surely not,”_ he dipped to peck her lips before shrugging on his officer’s jacket. His cool blue eyes had glinted slightly. _“You’d be short at least a dozen.”_

_Mmm. Alpha…_

She sets his plate delicately before his place, on top of his newspaper he’s folded down to _regard_ her, and seats herself in his lap.

“Goodness, child,” he says. He’s a little frownly, but he always is, and his hands come up to hold her hips, so it’s fine.

“You look mean this morning,” she chirps, running the tips of her fingers cherishingly along the razor-sharp lip of his hairstyle. It’s an honest compliment.

 _Lying’s a sin,_ he tells her.

He smirks, “You’re too kind.”

She stares wonderingly at him as her heartbeats slip by, thudding velvet-soft against her ribs. This man who murdered her slaver and burned Nima outpost to the ground for her. Who carried her back to his ship and bathed her in bacta and rose water and plaited her gleaming wet hair. This man who gave her his knot and his name and his mark on her gland and a _diamond ring_ , of all the insaneable, stupid, splendid, wondiferous things.

This man who is everything to her. Everything.

“I made you tea,” her voice is reverent and whispery, like the way he asks her to speak in church. She doesn’t always ‘member, but he’s kind about that, too. He’s kind about everything, her Alpha.

She blinks, and her lashes are wet.

“S’no sugar in it,” she promises, pivoting at the waist to reach the cup she set out for him earlier. It’s difficult to restrain herself from adding _something_ to it. Sugar, honey, jam. She wants it to be special, to be _correct_.

So he’ll keep her.

“Now why would I need sugar,” he drawls in that accent almost like hers, but more fine. He bounces his knee, “When I have all the sweetness I need, right here?”

She blushes, and flutters, and beams at him, dimples on full blast.

“Go on then,” his murmur is deep and smooth. He’s really trying not to smile now as he jiggles her again. “Kiss me.”

Her core clenches. She whimpers, she can’t help it, as she clasps his face in her hands and reaches for the back of his throat with her tongue.

His mouth is the softest thing about him, hot and wet and tasting faintly of peppermint and-

“Ahm’tage!”

He is panting when their lips part. His eyes widen as hers narrow, his strange-colored brows reach for the sky at her little finger flapping sharply in his face.

“You been smokin’?”

He _is_ smiling now, eyes crinkling at the corners and he’s not the least bit sorry. “I have.”

“Ahm’tage! S’bad. Very, very bad,” she flicks his nose to emphasize her point, and he _laughs._

“I mean it. You’ll get cancers…” she rubs his chest to soothe herself, the silky fabric of his vest smooth and warm beneath her palms as her vision goes all wobbly and wet. How is she ‘posed to take care of him if he doesn’t _listen_?

His face softens. He cups her cheek in his big, strong hand. “I very much doubt it.”

“Well I disagree,” she mocks him primly, holding his wrist, so much larger than hers, in her two hands. With his gentle grip on her waist, he circles his fingers into her back, just below her mating gland. The soft pressure makes her whimper.

He leans up and kisses her. His tongue is so hot and thick in her mouth.

Even though it’s not her heat, even if it’s just a kiss, she gushes.

He groans at her scent.

 _Sod the ciggies_ , she thinks as she scrambles, determined not to break the hot seal of their lips as she jostles to straddle his lap. She’ll nick them and run them through the disposal later.

Her flailing feet should have knocked back the table, except that after keeping her almost four months, her Alpha is _prepared_.

His hands grip her ass, nearly flat when he first saved her, now more lush from the food and easy labor he lavishes on her. Folding laundry, licking the dishes clean – house chores, essentially. His boot notches against the table leg, ice tinkling in his water glass as gracefully he slides it out of harm’s way.

He has very long and powerful legs, her Alpha. It’s no trouble at all for him to hold her pinned against the wall with their thighs stacked when he mounts her standing. He could def’nitely kick a happabore in half. She’s sure of it.

At the thought, another rush of slick dribbles from her naked folds. It wets her thighs and drenches his slacks. She ruts his crotch and mewls around his tongue in her mouth.

_Alpha._

His hands slide up her ribcage over his shirt, framing the undersides of her firm little breasts. He thrums delicately at her crinkled nipples with his thumbs. His touch is always so gentle, so _precise_ , like she is a fragile, priceless part that he cannot fly without.

 _“The treasure of my heart,”_ he calls her, when his knot is notched deep in her cunt and his hot seed is settled heavy and beautiful inside her belly.

She wishes she could bathe in him.

“Alpha…” she whispers into his mouth.

One long-fingered hand spans the side of her ribcage to hold her as the other slips down between her thighs to stroke sweetly at her sex.

His eyebrow arches elegant-like as he untangles their tongues to cluck, “My my, young lady-”

The tip of his finger curls and drags lightly through her lips, finding her sensitive and swollen. “Where _are_ your panties?”

“Don’t want them,” she murmurs, chasing his plush, wet mouth. His lips are so soft, like the bed they sleep in together. She loves the way they work tenderly over her breasts and the small folds of her sex before he mounts her.

“I see,” he says, all droll and smoke. His voice and his touch are like a drug, making her head swim and her lashes flutter and her heart beat faster.

Clutching one of his strong shoulders through the dark, smooth silk of his vest, she bites her lip and slowly drags the hem of his shirt she’s wearing up her belly. Her Alpha loves this, when she shows herself off to him.

She loves it, too.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, wetting his reddened lips as his cool, clear gaze fixes on the meeting of her thighs, “Good girl. Show Alpha your cunny.”

Her breath catches, want thrumming so hard in her low belly. She braces her hand on his knee behind her and tilts back, keeping her herself spread wide across his lap, so that she can bare fully her little sex to his hungry eyes.

Her small, smooth mound is pink and swollen. He peels her slick little lips apart.

“There we are,” he trails one finger down her center, always ‘mazed at the way her flesh jumps and ripples at his touch. “Such a pretty little cunt for such a pretty little girl.”

Her belly clenches with her contractions, the kitchenette is drowning in the scent of her arousal and her soft, mewling cries as he begins to stoke her pleasure.

“Alpha… Alpha…”

He groans when he slips his finger into her and her muscles drag him in to the knuckle. His eyes are fixed on the point where he parts her, her soppy pussy makes soft, lewd sounds as he adds a second finger in his search for that kernel of concentrated nerves.

She whimpers.

“I know, little one. I know,” he soothes as he touches her.

She’s very sore from her Alpha’s big cock. It’s a long, mean-looking limb, curved slightly and hard as durasteel. Wrapped up in velvety foreskin and seated on a knot that swells to the size of her small fist when he comes, its bulging bruise-colored veins rankle her tender sex when he fucks her.

He is almost too much to take.

Her heart pounds, his hand around her feels heavy and warm. Slowly, shakily, she shifts back her weight, spreading her thighs even wider.

“Good girl,” he praises, dark and deep. She watches as his fingers start to fuck her, sleek and gleaming with her slick. “Be still, cherished. Be quiet. Let Alpha touch you.”

_Yes. Let Alpha touch you. Touch, Alpha, touch-_

She drops her head back and mewls.

“So sweet,” he whispers.

Staring up into the kitchen light, he hurts so good inside her, thick fingertips sliding fast against that pocket of secret pleasure tucked away in her cunt. His broad shoulders, his hand holding her ribcage, his thick, powerful thighs – everything about him is so strong and so _big._

“Alpha…”

Her belly clenches and quakes as her spine stacks. Her hands stretch high above her, tips of her tiny fingers straining up through the grains of light as she starts to let go. He’s got her, she knows it, already falling back into an arc as his arm winds smoothly around her waist to catch her.

“Alpha-” she sings. Or keens pitifully. She’s not sure what sound even _is_ anymore, now that her orgasm is roaring in her ears like a sand storm over the western badlands.

She watches through dampening lashes as his cool eyes travel slowly up her body to meet hers. His gaze is ice and it is fire and it is beauty. _He_ is beauty, she realizes, as one of her hands floats trembling to touch his pale lashes.

“Come on, little dove,” he coaxes her quietly, unblinkingly, as if feeding a baby bird by hand, while he traces every feature of her face. “Come for Alpha.”

She bows back deeply, and bucks, clamping around his fingers so tightly they go completely still inside her as pleasure pure as sunlight pours through her core. Supported fully by his strong arm around her, she snap-shudders, babbling at the aching crush of sensation as the overhead light makes a sunset on the backs of her eyelids. “Uhn- I- Ahm’ta- ah-”

“God I love how you come for me,” his rasp is breathless as he nuzzles between the buttons of his shirt and kisses the shallow valley between her breasts. She hangs suspended in his lap. In his love. “My perfect little girl-”

It’s more goodness than she can bear.

Her eyes peel open, she fumbles shakily between her still-quaking thighs and drags his hand, soaked in her slick to his wrist, up to her breast.

“You make my heart beep,” her whisper warbles through the crackle of static in her ears. She presses her hand into his as she wills him to understand. “You make it beep o’ways-”

She thinks dimly that he _does_ understand, if his soft, hurting look is anything to go by.

“Oh my darling,” he sighs before he surges up to kiss her. His mouth is the sun at dawn.

Burning.

_Alpha._

His tongue slips inside to tease her before thrusting savagely along her own. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and holds on for all she is worth as he stands. It’s a smooth, powerful motion, one that changes her sense of direction, that turns over her heart like an engine.

She’s racing again over the hardpan against the storm.

“Ahm’tage,” she whimpers into his kiss when her bare ass meets the cold lip of the counter at the kitchen’s pass-through. It’s taller than the table, an easier reach for her towering Alpha.

Static from the starched fabric snaps quietly in her ears as he breaks their kiss to drag his dress shirt over her head. With her small body bared to the cool cycled air of their apartment, he stops and wonders at her.

She wonders back, at the terrible mess she’s made of him.

His pale face is splotched with high color, the collar of his dress shirt is hopelessly rumpled. His hair, gelled down firmly against the gale-force winds of a turbine, sticks up at all angles. His tie is loose and crooked, the crotch of his slacks glint with silvery trails of her slick.

“Poor Ahm’tage,” she worries, wetting her fingers with spit before she tries to tame some of his hair back. _God is cleanliness_ , he always says. Or something like that.

Well, he definitely isn’t cleanly now.

He _laughs._

“Hardly,” he tells her, taking her body back into his genuisable hands. Everywhere he touches her is electric.

He dips, hovering over one of her neck-glands. At the firm, wet glide of his tongue over her skin, her little belly quivers and her slick gushes anew.

“Oh, you have ruined me, little one,” he murmurs, harsh and soft in her ear. His breath tickles down her spine, making her shake in his arms. He palms her sex, kneading her wholly in his palm. “There’s nothing poor about it. I am your _slave_ -”

He cuts himself off to suckle deeply at the sweet, sensitive place just behind and below her ear as the heel of his hand rubs her hood.

Just like that, she comes.

It’s quick and violent, like a blow to the back of the head. Her eyes roll back, her head tips, breath hitching. Her mouth works but no sound comes out. She jerks and twitches, helpless when he drags his lips down her throat and draws in one of her cherry-tipped breasts. The feeling of being whipped by pleasure across her belly and inside her cunt won’t stop. She fists her hands in his shirt and screams silently.

It goes on forever.

His strong hands are kneading her everywhere, she realizes, as she starts to float down. Firm, gentle touches that have her legs parting so wide for him the taut, tender skin of her inner thighs stretches and her pussy grasps at air. Her slick is pooled beneath her on the counter, it dribbles in a long, glimmering strands towards the floor.

“Don’t lemme go,” she rasps, winding shaking arms around his neck. Her tongue is dry from her mouth hanging open and panting. When she licks her lips, she tastes salt.

He huffs a quarter-laugh as he works at his belt buckle. It comes loose from its loops with a leathery hush and thumps to the floor.

“Quite the opposite, I assure you,” he is trying to sound smug, but his gloating is cheated by the violent tremble in his fingers as he wrenches down his fly.

She watches, hyp’tized, as his slacks are shoved down his hips to reveal his pale, muscular thighs. His cock, an angry-looking creature, bobs like a cobra above its flared, thickening knob. The hot, heady scent of his musk slathers the air and coats her senses. She spins from it, grinning at once like a drunk.

Without so much as a hi-how-are-you, he jerks her off the bar by her hips, the slick puddled below her making the motion that much quicker. He holds her suspended in the strength of his bare hands. “I’m about to knot your little cunny so hard you’ll be stuck in my lap the rest of the week-end.”

Her breath hitches, she makes a sharp, pleased gasp as her cunt convulses with want.

_Yes-_

“Yes,” propped up on one elbow, she pats frantically at her folds, her little fingers making wet _slap-slaps_ and coming away with thin strands. “Yes yes yes-”

She braces back against the tile and grips its edge for dear life as he steps up between her thighs and saws his cock through the soaked seam of her sex. For a split second, they both marvel, panting and sweating and trembling, at the splay of her tiny lips over the breadth of his huge shaft.

“So small,” he moans, letting his forehead drift down to touch hers. “My angel’s so small.”

“Alpha-”

He thrusts, rewarded by her keening as the corded underside of his shaft thrums her needy little clit. He’s long enough that his cockhead kisses her bellybutton, smearing slick and precum across her navel, before his heavy sac ever slaps against her sex.

“Mount,” she mews, belly shaking and brows pinched together. She cannot splay her legs any wider, so she lifts her hips in his hands to show him what she wants. “ _Mount_.”

The pink mouth of her pussy is clenched so tight he slips twice against it before catching himself in his hand.

Her weight now hangs on his forearm, and barely on her hands shaking at the lip of the bar.

“Relax, cherished,” he pants, dipping to dapple kisses along her ribs where they strain against her skin. “Let me in.”

She can’t, not when she wants it _this much_ , but it doesn’t matter now that he’s guiding that thick, flared head against her, pressing and withdrawing, working her open to him. Her body tenses, flinching by memory at what comes next, even if it’s what she’s dripping for. That beautiful, violent feeling of being pushed apart-

Her inner clutch of muscles flutter and gave in as he forces his way to her womb.

She bows back so deeply the crown of her head touches the counter.

“ _Ahm’tage_ -”

His body curves over hers, sheltering her from the Galaxy as he grips her ass in both his hands and fucks her slowly. Opening her up. Preparing her to take more. The veins on his shaft drag through her. He is so heavy, so hot…

“There we are, that’s the way. Take all of it. Good girl. Good, good girl. Take Alpha’s cock-”

She whimpers, thighs scissoring at his until he changes his grip to slot her knees into the grooves of his arms. He fucks her faster, his thrusts chasing the streaks of lightening that bolt up her belly each time his cockhead strikes her womb. His knot is still outside her, beating frantically at her entrance, begging to be let inside.

She lies back on the cool tile of the counter, letting it sooth her mating gland, now burning like a brand, and takes it. All of it. Her heart beats so hard, in her breast and in her pulse and around his cock, it’s almost as if _she’s_ trapped inside of _it_. Her sex is buzzing, alive with the feeling of him fucking her, and there is no such thing as desert beneath her Alpha. There is no such thing as scared, or sad, or alone. There are only rivers, and oceans, and forests full of living things. Here, with his hot, fat cock moving liquid-quick inside her, there is more green than in all the Galaxy.

She is fragile, and beautiful, and small.

The apartment is filled with the dull, slick _smack_ of their bodies, her heavy panting and his sharp, irregular gasps. His musk overwhelms her, blanketing her senses in an urgent peace, willing her soft and plaint as he strokes every part of her at once. His heat soaks through his clothes and surrounds her, his fingers dig into the flesh of her ass.

On his next thrust, her cunt squeezes, then strangles. The muscles in her neck tense as her world tunnels down to-

“Good girl,” his graveling in her ear makes her eyes roll and her lashes flutter shut, “Come on my cock.”

She snaps shrieking, back bowing again as the racing zaps of pleasure ricochet through her with nowhere to go. A tidal waves crests and breaks over her, she feels physically dragged under as all her senses wipe out at once.

She floats soundlessly among the stars.

There is pressure, hurting, tearing pressure in some faraway place.

But not far, she realizes, watching herself from the ceiling above their bodies. It is his knot, forcing itself into her abused little pussy as he hunches into his orgasm. His hands are clamped around her waist now, thumbs overlapping because she is so small. He jerks her down to meet each brute thrust. Her tiny breasts bounce wildly, her hair loose from its buns drags with her along the counter.

His hangs down over his eyes as he slots his open, panting mouth over one of her glands and pins her down with his clothed bulk. His thrusts shallow out, he stays burrowed deep inside her belly as his cock begins to swell.

_Alpha is coming._

Just the thought makes her come again, her slick gushing, muscles gripping and holding his shaft to the mouth of her womb.

“Oh God, angel,” his snarl is in her ear and in her heart, “going to… fill you up- Oh Christ, _fuck-”_

His breath stutters hot and wet against her neck as the first burst of his seed erupts. His knot swells, he jerks and pulses inside her, stretching her beyond what she can bear.

She cannot stop coming.

The tension in her legs and in her neck, the shake in her belly, the way her cunt closes in and knits around him, strangling his cock as he coats her insides with thick, creamy heat, blanks her mind. Bliss sparkles over her, a bajillian dots of sunlight on the ocean.

The last thing she knows before she slips into the cool, safe darkness below is-

“I am so pleased, little one.”

 

 

 

 

The universe floats back to her by degrees.

First there is the thick scent of his musk and his warmth that surrounds her. She is like a baby caterpillar, the kind in the book he reads to her at night, _cocooned_ in her Alpha. She can feel the silkiness of his vest against her bare back, the weight of his arm where it’s settled over her belly, his legs stretched out long beneath hers, the rise and fall of his chest. Most of all, she feels his knot still swollen and heavy in her cunt, and deep inside her, the hot slosh of a belly full of cum.

She sinks into a satisfied sigh as next she notices the sharp, quiet _crack_ of a wood bat followed by cheering and a crisp, measured voice calling out hits and runs, all coming from the holoprojector across the room turned down low. Even softer behind it is the music pouring from the radio in the kitchen, some wordless, gentle song that makes her think of flowers opening and tiny, pretty children drifting off to sleep. She can hear his heartbeat, too, steady and strong.

She opens her eyes, lashes flickering against the warm light of a table lamp and the cool bluecast of the holo.

They are in the living room.

What time it is, she does not know.

Her Alpha is reclined within his favorite chair, head tipped back against the dark leather rest, his half-frame reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. His lips are pursed, he’s reading his holopad in his hand not holding her, peering sharply through the lenses at facts and figures she will never understand. He is slightly less messy, and still a little frownly.

Still her Armitage.

The thought makes her core clench a little at his cock still inside her. There’s an answering throb from his knot where it stretches her, followed by a hot, sudden spurt of his cum.

He grunts, and smiles, just a little bit.

“Well,” he glances down at her. His lenses make his blue eyes almost completely clear, like the diamond in her ring. “I gather someone’s awake.”

She can’t answer, she’s still too overwhelmed by the pressure of his big cock inside her, and the possessive cradle of his hand on her belly without. So she tips up her chin and presses a prayerful kiss to his jaw, hoping he understands her.

_I love you, Alpha._

He must, she thinks, if she judges by the way his knuckles whisper lovingly over her arm. He’s set his pad on the table next to his chair so that he can trace his fingertips over her thighs and fondle her small breasts.

Her cunt grips again, and again he twitches and jets.

She whimpers.

Behind his holopad, there’s a water glass and a little plate of fruits and cheeses beside it. The glass is nearly full, the ice inside melted as if it’s been standing for hours. Cool-looking beads of liquid light cling trembling to its sides.

She licks her lips and swallows.

“Would you like a drink, little dove?” his murmur is warm velvet in her ear as his big hand strokes tenderly over her hair. He’s brushed and braided it, tied it up with pink silk ribbon at the ends.

The realization makes her heart bloom inside her chest as she nods.

Very carefully, he tips cool water past her lips down her throat. The angle is just right, so that it isn’t too fast and doesn’t dribble over as she drinks in long, greedy gulps.

“Slowly, my love,” he coaxes her.

She gives a satisfied little huff when she’s done, her tongue feeling wonderfully cold against the roof of her mouth. Later, she’ll nibble at the bits of fruit and cheese he has waiting for her, letting him feed her by hand between soft kisses and gentle touch.

For now, she closes her eyes and nuzzles back into his chest, savoring his cock inside her and his warm weight as he settles his arms surround her.

Rey loves Saturdays.

Alpha stays home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you're having a wonderful time. If you are, let me know in the comments, and click the kudos button, if you would be so kind : )


	3. Lay Thee Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small smackerel of plot creeps in...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since this kink took such a beating on Tumblr the other day, I thought - 
> 
> Let's go en flagrante, shall we?
> 
> As ever, read the tags love the tags be the tags.

He is the very last to leave the offices.

The track lights above the labyrinth of cubicles that make up the bulk of this level are motion-sensing. One-by-one, they flicker on as he strides at an elegant clip for the lift bay, each one a second too late, so that he leaves a series of empty, blue-lit corridors in his wake.

Inside the lift, he enters the access code for his private apartments, keeping his eyes open long enough for the mandatory retinal security scan, then leans against the white-lit paneling and allows them to close.

_What a bloody week._

Riots erupted in Coruscant on Monday.

It was the largest attempt at civil dissidence since the fall of the Empire. Thousands of the Galactic City’s citizens poured into its streets to burn and loot in protest of their new autocratic government. Within minutes, the Galaxy’s center for intersystem diplomacy and trade negotiations, the Supreme Consulate, was ransacked and set alight. Its employees, a staff numbering over two hundred and ranging from diplomats to administrators to guard-soldiers, were drug out into the streets and shot.

When he arrived with forces to put an end to the uprising, he found a world on fire.

Even with the experienced ground fleets of the fifth and ninth infantries under his expert leadership, it took ten hours to stop the riots. It was another six before the last fire was finally put to ash. Several hundred billion credits-worth of property was stolen or destroyed in the ravage. Among the fatalities were forty-two infantry soldiers and three senior officers.

Census was still counting the civilian casualties. So far, the number was in the tens of thousands.

As the lift smoothly changes direction from up to left, he pinches the bridge of his nose and wills the pounding behind his eyes to stop.

The dissidents had been too well-organized, too well-armed, to be mere civil insurgents. As he’d long suspected and had cautioned Supreme Leader Snoke, the primary threat to Galactic stability did _not_ lay in a new generation of Jedi mystics, but in the large-scale, deeply-entrenched organized crime syndicates, like the Hutts and Kangi Club. These organizations had sizable standing militias of their own, and could use their black-market access to cheap weaponry to arm subversives and whip up anti-Imperialist sentiment across the Galaxy as a diversion while they continued to defy law and order.

A warning Leader Snoke dismisses with a sneer.

To compound matters, it appears the Supreme Leader and his apprentice have had a falling out. Ren is rarely seen around the ship, Hux knows he absconds frequently with his breeder, the notoriously beautiful Bazine Netal, to Canto Byte. He doubts it is for pleasure – he sees the signs of mutiny gathering on the horizon like a storm above the ocean, and he knows the Sith is amassing the power he needs to challenge his master.

Through the miasma of fatigue, his brain whirrs on overdrive, running simulations and cataloguing risks by order of magnitudes. If there is to be a regime change, he does not intend merely to survive it.

Armitage Hux has not come so far only to land up in exile or obscurity. Not when-

He closes those mental compartments as he feels the lift begin to slow its glide. Again he is prompted for a retinol scan and personnel code when it stops. An extra measure of security he added after-

“Ahm’tage!”

The door slides aside into its pocket, seeming to take the cares of the day with it. Because standing there in the small private lobby of their home is his omega.

She’s wearing her pale blue dress, the one with long sleeves and an a-line skirt that cinches sweetly at her tiny waist. Her little stockinged feet peep out from under her hem, her long, soft hair is gathered back from her face by a large satin bow. She wrings her hands in front of her and chews her lip, standing up on her tiptoes with neck craned as the door opens, to _peek him first,_ as she calls it.

Upon seeing him, she squeals with unadulterated delight.

“Ahm’tage!”

He is not a man prone to high, frivolous emotions. He prides himself on being the opposite of the Siths – collected, controlled. Remote.

But he cannot help the way his throat tightens and his heart climbs up into the stars when he sees her.

His beautiful, beautiful girl.

He’s hardly across the threshold into their home’s lobby when she launches herself into his arms. She’s light as a feather, warm as sunlight between his two hands.

“Finally you’re back!” she cries. She bathes his face in wet, glossy kisses and fast flicks of her little pink tongue. It is like being greeted by a loth-kitten, how she purs and mews at him, kneading his glands then nuzzling against them to mark herself in his scent. She is all soft, sweet-smelling warmth, her kisses taste like chocolate mints and tea made syrupy by honey.

She is heaven.

He holds her aloft with his arms locked together under her bottom and lets her work him over. Her small fingers crunch through his crisp hairstyle, she works loose the knot of his tie as she tells him almost breathlessly, “Oh Ahm’tage, I missed you so much I almost died.”

“I highly doubt that,” he chides mildly, even if his chest is swelling with smug, aching pride. He walks them through the doorway that leads to their living rooms, careful not to bump her on the threshold above as they go.

She’s left on nearly every lamp in the house to guide his way, he notices.

“I promised myself I was goin’ to run ‘way if you didn’t come back before ‘leven,” she tells him, now busying herself with the eye-hooks at his collar.

“Did you really?” he hikes her higher, shifting her weight easily within his arms. Her knees hug his waist as he smirks, “And how might you have managed that, pray, when it is well past your bedtime?”

Her sudden guilty look makes him laugh.

“Well,” she hedges, pressing her little nose to his so that he has to find their way down the hall by memory, “you _were_ gone so long. And I was so mad I ate your dinner after mine, and I didden even feel sorry about it, only later I did, so I made you a zamwich-”

“I see,” he says, cherishing how small and serious she sounds. His eyes trace each of her smooth, delicate features as finally – _finally_ – his footsteps breach their bedroom.

But God, is she a sight for sore eyes.

“Don’t you want it?” she asks as he sets her tenderly on the edge of their bed. His fingers work deftly over the rest of the hook-and-eye closures on his uniform coat, popping each one with a smooth, practiced touch.

“Want what, my angel?” he asks her quietly.

“Your zamwich,” she pipes, following with her big, round eyes as he kneels before her. “It’s a jelly-kind.”

“Later, perhaps.” He takes her waist between his hands again. “Let me look at you.”

She sits up straighter, dress rustling like tissue paper against the duvet as she wraps her arms about his neck and laces her fingers behind his nape. Her chin tips, she flutters her lashes at him like a little courtesan. “Why, do you think I’m prettiful?”

“My darling,” he cups her cheek. The high points of her face glow soft and ethereal in the lamplight, “there are no words in all the languages of the Galaxy to describe how beautiful you are.”

He kisses her sweetly, losing himself in the feel of her small, soft mouth.

When their lips part, it’s with a gentle, sensual sound.

His eyes find hers beneath the veil of her lashes as he strums her lip with his thumb. “You are rarer than rubies, more precious than gold. You are the treasure of my heart.”

The air between them changes, thickening and deepening with the sudden, heady rush of her scent as her slick gushes.

“Mount,” she mewls. She drags him back to her by her hands now balled in his shirtfront. Her lips wait wet and parted for his kiss, when his tongue strokes firmly into her mouth, she moans.

But God, how he loves to kiss her.

Her breath hitches in his mouth as his hands reach smoothly under the hem of her skirt. She holds very still, just the way he taught her, as he touches her through her panties. Her little folds are plump and swollen, her cleft already damp through the fabric as he gives her gentle, feather-light strokes.

He parts their lips as he starts to roll down her stocking. She leans back on her palms to watch his large, strong hands move slowly down her leg with the snow-colored silk. It releases her foot with the softest of sighs, revealing her pale, delicate arch and tiny, perfect toes.

“Alpha-” she whispers. Her scent envelopes them, thick with want.

Cock already straining against his slacks, he props her small heel up onto his knee and runs his thumbs firmly up her sole, relishing the way she flops back onto the bed, her arms spread out at her sides along the soft duvet and dimples on parade, and moans for him. He works the ball of her foot, kneading tenderly at the flesh there until she’s restless and mewing, flexing her little toes and pawing at the linens like a kitten. He repeats himself with the other, drawing down her stocking slowly, his eyes meeting hers as she sits up again to watch. This time, after massaging her, he ends with a kiss on each of her toes.

Her giggled, “Ahm’tage!” is the most precious sound in all the Galaxy.

“Such a beautiful girl,” he praises, following the trail his blue eyes make up her smooth, suntanned skin with his fingers.

Even shadowed by the skirt of her dress, pulled up almost to her hips now, he can still see where her slick has drenched the gusset of her white panties, turning it translucent and molding it to the petal-like folds of her sex.

“Is that your pretty cunny?” he rumbles quietly, touching what belongs to him without hesitation. His voice is a timber even a kit can recognize for its intent.

“Yes,” she answers, sounding unbelievably young. Without wiles, she draws up her dress even higher and widens her thighs. She is perfectly innocent in her eagerness to please her Alpha, no matter how filthy his ask of her.

Her breath snares, mouth making a pretty little _oh_ as he glides two thick fingers firmly through her seam. When he leans in and follows the gesture with his tongue, her hips leave the bed.

He suckles her through her panties, savoring the feel of the smooth cotton grain over the hot flesh of her pussy between his lips and on his tongue. The fabric yields her taste, warm bath water and fresh tears, as her scent completely blankets his senses.

“Alpha,” she whimpers, her tiny fingers twisting desperately in his hair. “Alpha…”

Slowly, as everything in the Galaxy but his kit fades away, he peels back her panties to reveal her delicate pink folds.

She is so, so small.

His lips part, he watches unblinkingly the thin tendrils of silvery slick that tremble between her and the fabric as he glides it away. The soaked gusset leaves a trail of shining wet along the insides of her thighs that he follows with his lips.

At the first slip of his tongue through her hot, bare lips, she keens and bucks.

He feels immortal.

His thumbs part her tenderly, revealing her to his hungry eyes.

“So pretty,” he whispers.

She gushes.

Her flesh is slick and pulsing with need, it jumps when softly he circles his thumb around her clit. Around her opening, she is red and swollen, rubbed raw from how often and roughly he takes her, at all hours of the day and night.

When he touches her there, just a tender stroke, she whimpers.

The primal part of him, the one he keeps tightly leashed with suppressants and dogged self-will, revels in the knowing that even when her Alpha is not there, she feels his ache in her belly and in her cunt.

She is _his_ little bitch.

His cock swells, knot throbbing at the thought.

“Are you sore, my angel?” he asks, watching her large, glossy eyes as he presses lightly at her opening. Her belly contracts, concaving beneath her dress as she worries her lip and nods. “Do you want Alpha to kiss it better?”

Again, she nods. It is frenetic this time. “Yes Alpha, please. Please please plea-”

Her words catch, back bowing like a ballerina’s as his lips seal over her clit and suckle.

He eats her lavishly, unhurriedly, lapping at her little pussy like he means to savor every morsel of her. Her slick dribbles generously, smearing his maw as he thrusts his tongue inside her opening, her tight ring of muscles flexing to keep him there, where she is most desperate to feel him. He doesn’t linger though, withdrawing to bathe her vulva in long, fat stripes and open-mouthed kisses. Her flesh is hot, sweet and soft.

When his tongue begins to circle her clit, the backs of her thighs in his hands quiver. The rustling of her dress and of her long hair and its pretty satin ribbon on the duvet dies out. There is only the sound of her hitched, stuttered breaths and his tongue laving at her small sex as she goes perfectly still.  

His eyes travel the length of her body, over where her belly is clenched and shaking, past the neck of her dress she’s pulled down to reveal her small, rose-tipped breasts, to her face. Her mouth is open, the tip of her pink kitten tongue pressed up against her teeth as she pants, eyes shut, brow pinched in concentration. She is the picture of wonton beauty.

He wants to fuck her to pieces.

Instead, he seals his lips over her clit and uses the very tip of his tongue to bully her little pearl around and around its nest as he suckles.

“Alpha,” she sobs out, straining up against his mouth. Her fingers wrench violently in his hair. “Alpha-”

Something savage and tender rankles hotly across his ribs as he makes her come. Her head tips back, mouth working at the ceiling, he feels her thighs flex and shudder as she shrieks prettily through her orgasm.

It’s a sight he never grows tired of. One he imagines when he’s alone at work. How helpless she is when she comes. How lost.

Even now, as he looms over her, working off his belt with his heart pounding, she cannot sense his danger. She trembles and coos up at him, tips of her little fingers trailing lightly over her bare breasts and the silk bunched around her belly. Some of her hair has come loose of its bow, it falls across her eyes staring worshipfully up into his face, full of love. Full of trust.

“Take off your dress,” he tells her quietly, and she rushes to obey him. Her hands still shake badly, from her pleasure and her building excitement. With his cock now free of his slacks, he helps her.

“Good girl,” he sooths. She sobs with relief when his warm, strong hands smooth all over her body, making soft, hushed sounds against her skin. “Good, good girl. Look at you, Rey. Look how perfect you are. How pretty-”

He palms her small breasts, swollen and aching from his love. His thumbs strum tenderly at her blushing, pebbled nipples.

“Such a pretty little kit,” he whispers, almost to himself, before he leans over her and takes one of her breasts wholly into his mouth.

She cries out, wrapping her little arms and legs around him to anchor him. He feels her heat through his clothes, his heart beats rapidly inside of him, seemingly everywhere at once. In his chest, in his groin, in his throat. He is living for her, he realizes, as she holds his broad shoulders as much as she can and rocks her hips, seeking his cock where it leaks long and hot against her belly.

 ****There have been many nights when he’s made love to her just like this, wrapped up in his arms beneath the sheets, working her with his mouth and with his touch as he takes her over and over, until his knot seals his seed inside her womb. Her small hands petting him everywhere as she presses sweet kisses into his hair, crowning him king of her universe.

But tonight, he desires a different sort of heaven.

He releases her breast with a wet, succulent sound, watching her skin glisten with his spittle in the light before he coaxes her gently, “Up. On your knees, little one.” ****

She whines low in her throat but does as she’s told, untangling her limbs from his body and working herself over with his help. She’s so slight he drags her easily, so that her knees are at the very edge of the bed, feet dangling, pale, bare bottom gleaming like a freshly culled pearl beneath the vicious jut of his erection. Her hair slips over her shoulder and brushes softly along the comforter, the loops of its bow make a sweet frame for her nape.

He cannot deny the dark thrill that goes through him as he steps in between her shins and splays his large hands over the pert globes of her ass, spreading her open to him. His precum beads on her rump and drips down the backs of her thighs, he can see her mating gland just under her shoulder, swollen and pulsing beneath her skin, marred deeply by the marks of his teeth. His primitive delights in this, when she is naked and he is not. His hard cock nestles in the cleft of her cheeks, monstrous against her small back. Her slick dribbles down to the bed for him.

She nuzzles down into the soft, lush comforter and touches her shoulders to the bed, fingers twining next to them to brace herself for what she knows comes next.

“Such a sweet little girl,” he praises quietly, tracing her slick folds with his thumbs as he continues to hold her open to his inspection. “You please me so much, my angel.”

“Alpha,” she sighs back. She tenses a little under his hand as he uses the other to guide his thick, flared head through her folds. He is furiously hard now, leaking fast and generous, nearly purple as he rubs himself against her clit.

The sensation makes him hiss and her whimper pitifully.

Slowly, ever so slowly, his palm smooths up her spine as he bends over her, threading his fingers through her soft hair and silk ribbon. At the same time the head of his cock kisses her entrance, he closes his fist and pulls.

Delicately.

She mewls and arches deeply, cunt tightening in the loveliest way as he forces himself inside her.

“Alpha-”

“Be still, cherished,” he gravels in her ear, close enough to tickle the little hairs at her nape as his fist tightens minutely. This angle makes it difficult to sink in all at once, which is why he likes it so. He closes his eyes to savor the press of her soft, slick pussy all around him, the feeling of her little muscles resisting trembling before they give way to his harder, hotter flesh, gobbling him up in her pulsing warmth.

She whimpers and strains back, her breath coming in small, panicked huffs. “Can’t…”

“Shhh. You’re not listening to me, little one. Relax,” he noses her cheek turned upwards and presses a tender kiss to her forehead. “This is what you’re made for.”

She sags into a stuttering sigh, her curved belly dipping towards the bed as she relaxes around him.

He sinks smoothly home.

“There, that’s it, good girl. Take it all,” he soaks up the tears that slip like starlight down her cheek with his kiss while his hands sooth her everywhere with soft, sweeping touch. “Does it hurt, angel?”

“Yes,” she whimpers, cunt fluttering helplessly at his girth. With his fingertips, he draws small circles over her belly. He can feel his own heaviness against his hand when he cups her.

“Good,” he whispers in her ear. “Now be very still.”

Her pussy gulps. She trembles, mewling with closed eyes as he works his mouth over her shoulder and across her nape. Her skin is warm, damp with sweat. His heart beats a rabid tattoo through his chest against her back.

When his tongue glides over one of her scent glands, she keens and bucks, swallowing him deeper stiller as she squeezes for all she’s worth.

His eyes roll back at the sensation.

“Nah-naughty kit,” he chides, breathless at her hot, wet clutch and gloating dimple. Without warning, he withdraws until the flare of his cockhead catches on the tight ring of muscle at the mouth of her cunt, and thrusts.

She wails.

 _Oh, heaven. This is heaven_.

She is all wriggling, mewing bitch beneath him as he sets a punishing pace. His strokes are not quick, not yet, but they are long and furious. He batters her womb while his fist in her hair and his weight folded over her keep her trapped at this angle, unable to shorten his reach or rock with his thrusts. Her pussy squelches lushly with each return, she shrieks, pitched, pleading little whines that make his lungs burn and his gut clench with lust as she struggles like she means to unseat him.

_Impossible._

He bears down on her, twisting his fist at her nape and growling lowly in warning.

His kit goes perfectly still.

As the bed shifts and judders beneath her, a crisp, formal voice is insisting he ought not to take her so forcefully. She is small, after all, and very young. Very tender. It is muffled by the roaring of his blood that crests and smashes against the shore of his conscious like a tidal wave. He feels her slick rushing, so thick it soaks through his slacks, and sees her eyes roll back and her lashes flicker as he takes her savagely. Her mouth hangs open, forming strangled, half-shaped words. Her thighs shake and strain beneath his. He smells no fear in her scent that drenches their bedroom and paints his senses. Only desire.

She adores this.

So does he, shutting his eyes briefly as he quickens his pace, pistoning fast through her choked, sloshing heat as scenes he pretends he’s too polite to image slide past him like headlamps moving over a wall. Of meeting her in some wild, verdant place, both of them uncovered beneath a canopy of green burnished gold by sunlight. Of chasing her through lush undergrowth, the soil moist and soft under his bare feet, of her delighted, frightened, eager shrieks as he overtakes her. Of making love to her in his lair, on her hands and knees in a bed of soft, fragrant findings, his hot breath in her ear as he coats her womb and seals her with his knot. This beautiful, feral foundling. His sweet little bitch-

He groans loudly as his conscious comes to the fore in time to realize she’s bleating, body shaking like plates of a planet rearranging itself. Her sweat pools in the beautiful dip of her lower back and between the blades of her shoulders, wetting his shirtfront so that molds to the definition in his abdomen and chest.

He glides over her, relishing the wet slap of his hips against her bare bottom and the fact that their hands have found each other on her belly, fingers intertwined. Feeling her insides clench around him like a plush, drenched vice, grappling to hold him to her womb, he leans over his fist still holding her hair and rasps in her ear.

“Good girl, come on Alpha’s cock.”

She tenses and judders, keening so shrilly, so brokenly, it splits his hearing and rings through every one of his cells. Or maybe it is the sensation of her orgasm, gripping and tugging at him so strongly that he cannot breathe, he cannot move, he cannot _think_. It drags him under, so that his arms wrap around her fully as her slick surges and his senses flood with her.

“Oh Christ oh _fuck-_ ” he puffs out into her hair, against her neck, fighting against the instinct to sink his teeth into her mating gland, the one that burns between their sweat-soaked bodies as her essence runs liquid-hot over his knot.

“Alpha!” she wails. Unable to take much more of his love, she reaches back with her hand not tangled with his to grope at his hair. Her breath hitches, then catches completely as he gives into her desire and slams his swelling knot through her opening, locking himself inside her cunt.

She shudders and convulses as he paints her in come.

His teeth do find her then, boring deep enough into her gland to bruise the skin as she keens loud and low. With her gland still clamped, he shakes his head, making her whine and lie still so that he can press himself even deeper, digging against her womb as his cock swells and pumps jet after hot, glorious jet to fill her to the brim.

His eyes pinch shut, his spine tenses then slacks with every gratuitous burst of pleasure. When it’s over, white static crackles in his ears.

“Good Alpha,” she slurs. Her little hand pat-pats softly, sloppily at his forearm locked around her. She sounds exhausted, from a thousand lightyears away. “Good, good Alpha.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Ahm’tage.”

He’d been drifting, thoughts sinking into that strange place that looms shapeless, shadowed and vaguely sinister behind his mind.

 _Sleep_ , he thinks with the thinnest of smiles. _What a malignant state for the wicked._

He inhales sharply through his nose. Concentrating on the slight weight of his cigarette snared between his two fingers, and opens his eyes.

Even the low light of the side lamps seems over-bright.

“Forgive me, my darling,” he flicks his cigarette over the tray on the nightstand. A swath of crumbling ash drips off its tip into the glass.

The sight makes him uneasy, though at first he cannot name why.

 _No bother,_ he thinks as, with his opposite hand, he strums his fingertips along the smooth, warm skin of her arm. “What were you saying?”

Still caught on his knot, his kit sits astride him as he reclines in their bed, leaned forward on her palms planted on his now-bare chest, knees notched under his ribcage. She huffs and pouts. “Ahm’taaage…”

Her cheeks are still rosy from her orgasm. He tickles one, heart lightening when she hides it against her shoulder and smiles.

“I am sorry, my angel,” he means it. “I’m a bit overtired. My work is-”

He doesn’t finish the thought.

The slim vent in the wall over their bed hums benignly as it draws smoke from the end of his cigarette that sizzles in time with his long draw.

“Obv’usly,” she says. Her hands smooth up his chest, across his shoulders, and down his arms in a sweet, sensual loop.

“You’re workin’ too much,” she pleads softly. Her eyes are round and glimmering in the lamp’s intimate light.

For a moment he simply watches her, noting the worry set in the smooth, shallow lines of her face.

In his mind’s eye, he sees the bodies of the staff on Coruscant, lined imperfectly along the street. One of the girls had looked so young, between the flurries of ash that fell like snowfall from the fires-

He concentrates on the feeling of her – her small weight on his hips, her warm, wet clutch around his cock, the softness of her belly beneath his thumb as he holds her waist and strokes her in a slow, pendulous motion. Her skin whispers in a register that is barely perceptible over the low drone of the ventilator above.

 _She is right here,_ he tells himself. _She is safe and fully alive._

 _But for how long?_ a voice murmurs before receding into the dark.

Its echo rings cold through his gut as he answers her quietly, “Perhaps.”

“S’no perhapsin’ about it. Ahm’tage-” she cups his face between her hands.

The gesture is so sudden, so touching, he feels oddly choked.

_Too many cigarettes._

She watches him stub it out as her eyes turn liquid against the light. “You’d tell me, if somethin’ was bofferin’ you. Right? Like if I- if I did somethin’ wrong, to make you wanna go ‘way-”

“Hold it right there,” he catches her by the wrists. Her fingertips tremble in the hollows of his cheeks, she rolls her lips together and stares down at her hands.

His murmur is deep and soft, “You have in no way displeased me. None whatsoever. Rey, I have never been so at peace in my life than when I am with you. Look at me, cherished.”

She doesn’t, curling her shoulder and hiding against it instead. It is a peculiar quirk of hers, especially when she’s locked onto him like this, the head of his cock still touching her womb, her slick dripping down his sac onto the sheets, her small breasts naked to his eyes.

He thumbs her wrists, grateful for once when instinct takes over and his next words come out as rumble that is somewhat softer than a growl, but still firm. Still _Alpha._

“Look at me when I am speaking to you.”

She peeks at him from beneath her lashes. Tears shimmer within them like specks of snow.

Again, he pictures bodies in piles of ash, and a world on fire.

_Not here._

He brings her wrists together and tucks hers hands upon his chest. Upon his heart.

“You are my solace,” his eyes search hers for understanding, “Do you know what that means?”

She shakes her head and blinks. Her tears race each other down her cheeks like playing children.

He catches them with the side of his finger, feeling them melt into his skin.

“You are my comfort, and my relief. When I am sad, when I am lost, I think of you-” slowly, he reaches up and draws her hair still bound by damp silk altogether over her shoulder, watching it tumble richly down her breast to kiss her waist, “just like this. And my heart-”

He presses her palm into his chest so that she can feel its steadfast, staccato beat.

“My heart is lifted. Don’t you see, my darling?” he beseeches her through the lamplight, “You _are_ my joy, the very source of it. Rey-”

Finally, she looks at him fully.

“You are my love.”

She sobs out, a short, breathless, incandescent sound before she dips down to kiss him.

His hands sift slowly through her hair as ardently, worshipfully, he returns it for all that he’s worth.

Somewhere in the midst of it all, his knot slips smoothly from her body, coating his sac and the sheets below him in a thick, warm rush of come. He ignores it, taking her small waist between his hands and making love to her with his mouth.

Many minutes later, after their lips have parted, the tips of her fingers stroke feather-soft inside the shallows of his cheeks.

“Ahm’tage,” she asks, “are you really so sad?”

He can’t help the upward tick at the edge of his mouth. It is so like her, to be concerned at one little word.

_Sad._

“Rarely, my dove,” he promises, watching her through hooded eyes as he tilts to kiss her palm. He refuses to think of the fires now, or the screaming, or the ash he still tastes sometimes when he swallows.

He only wants to think of her.

The chronometer on the bedside says it’s half-past eleven. He must be up again at oh-five-hundred, moving quietly about their bedroom while his kitling sleeps safely in the warm well his body leaves behind.

_However…_

He works them over, away from the wet, so that she lays under him in the cool dry linens that slide sensually over their skin.

By rote, her thighs draw up and open, showing him her pretty pussy, raw and glistening from his affections.

Gently he peels her folds apart, captivated by the sight of his come dribbling milky-white from her abused opening as she clenches reflexively under his touch. Their comingled musks, her innocence mixed with his darker, sharper scent, thickens the air around them.

“So lovely,” he whispers, gliding his fingertip through his own come. Where it hangs down heavy between his thighs, his cock twitches.

He shifts, moving over her to nuzzle at her cheek before he asks, “Will you be a good girl for Alpha and take a little more?”

Instinctively, her small hand goes down between their bodies to shelter her sex.

“But I’m sore...” she mewls.

“Hush now, angel,” he lays a sweet line of kisses in the valley between her breasts, “Alpha will be gentle.”

Her breath thins and catches as he dips to take one of her little cherry nipples into his mouth. He works her with his tongue, her texture changing with her arousal before he lets her loose with a soft, wet _smooch_.

Her cheeks are flushed, belly rising and shallowing with her quick pants as she watches.

“Good girl,” he praises darkly, meeting her through his hair that’s fallen into his cool blue eyes. His cock, now thrumming, nudges coaxingly at her hand.

When he draws her other nipple into his mouth, she arches.

He leisures at her breast, laving her with his tongue as if he has all the time in the world while she trembles, exhausted from his love and yet aching for more.

Her own hand between her legs massages tenderly at her mound as he trails still more lingering kisses up her clavicle onto her shoulder, savoring the salty taste of her taut, warm skin.

Oh, but he could kiss her forever.

Her head tips in anticipation, lashes flickering shut when his lips finally find the gland in her neck.

She mews pitifully at his deep suckle.

A sudden gush of slick soaks the air in sex. It leaches through her fingers and smears hotly over the head of his cock.

He groans against her. As his lips ghost wet across the shell of her ear, he takes her tiny wrist loosely within his grasp.

“Put Alpha’s cock against your pussy,” he rumbles.

She gasps and shudders. Her pulse skitters beneath his thumb as she hesitates.

“Now, kit.”

There is great power in his professional position. Vast armies and systems bow to his command. But it is nothing compared to the sweetness of her surrender, when her hand fumbles shaking to his length and guides him to her center.

“Such a good little girl,” he whispers, and presses forward.

A man of his word, he takes her very gently this time.

Surrounded by soft sheets and lush comforter, nestled into pillows fragrant with her lingering perfume and his cologne, he wraps her up in his strong embrace and moves very slowly inside her, bathing her in soft-lipped kisses between tender words of praise.

“How sweet you are, how precious. So good. So small. Yes, take my cock, just like that. Could fuck your little cunt forever. Yes, that's it, good girl. Take it all-”

They are both sweat-slick and panting, bodies slip-sliding against one another in a tangle of warm sheets as his orgasm stacks in his gut and along his spine. She wails softly, caught somewhere between ache and rapture, unable to move or to speak. Her sore little cunt grips tightly as his cock begins to swell.

“Knot,” she whimpers, eyes pinched shut, hands scrabbling at his back. She can feel it battering at her door. Her body arches and quivers, panicking that he won’t give it to her. “Alpha _knot_ -”

His orgasm sideswipes him like a spiraling Fighter, his breath gutters out as he catches her smoothly with his forearm beneath her hips and drives himself to seat inside her with one quick, violent thrust.

“Always, dearest,” he rasps, before instinct overtakes him and he sinks his teeth into her gland as he convulses with the first hot eruption.

_Fuck breed bite-_

She comes keening at the ceiling.

They both shake like newborn colts when it’s finished. Too tired to move, too tired to think, he collapses them deep into the mattress. She winds herself around him, as if she means to never let him go.

He prays the same before sleep swallows him whole.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morning comes too soon to claim him.

He watches her as he works deftly, silently in the near-dark at the closures on his uniform coat. She is like an angel in repose, her body wrapped in translucent white, hair draped sweetly over her shoulder onto her bare breasts. Her hands are tucked together beneath her pink cheek, her faint freckles peek at him through the lush fan of her dark lashes. She snores lightly through parted lips.

Oh, he loves her.

A fact that fascinates him still.

“Ahm’tage,” she murmurs in her sleep. Her little brow creases, her eyelids flicker but stay shut.

He does not know what difficulties the new day will bring. It is a funny business, building kingdoms atop shifting sands. But he knows this, as he sits fully dressed now on the bed beside her, gloves on and cap beneath his arm – no matter the challenge, he will triumph.

Her life depends upon it.

“Ahm-tage…”

“Shh-shh-shh,” he strokes her hair back from her face. His deep lilt pours tenderly from his lips so near her temple.

“Golden slumbers kiss your eyes… smiles await you when you rise… Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry… and I shall sing you a lullaby.... Care you know not, therefore sleep… while over you a watch I’ll keep-”

Swallowing against the tremor in his voice, he finishes whispering, “Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry... And I shall sing you a lullaby.”

He kisses her forehead, and rises.

The light shuts itself off after he leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know if you're having a good time, or if there's something sweet you'd like to see. I will do my best with the crayons in my box : )


	4. The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this plot-gravy got thick rather quick, didn't it? Damn it, Pastel. Why can't we ever have anything *nice*?

By the end of the following week, the riots have increased tenfold.

Insurrection spreads like wildfire throughout the Core, catching worlds and burning them to ash faster than he can put them out. He has no doubt now as to who is behind it. The locations are too strategic, the devastation too precise. It is the crime families, vying for power-parody with a fledgling, mismanaged Empire.

And quickly gaining ground.

At first, he believed they would coordinate their attacks against the Order’s diplomatic posts and military bases to make their message clear. But he soon realized the rebellion on Coruscant was merely an overture, that their true aim was far more catastrophic.

Trade hubs.

In fewer than ten days, over half the Galaxy’s meta-centers for commercial and financial trade have gone up in flames. Forty billion credits in goods and infrastructure were destroyed, while still thousands more freight-crafts stalled over the smoldering ruins, market-less and panicked as their livestock perished and their crops turned to rot.

The people, _their_ people, were going to starve.

And the Sith is nowhere to be found.

“Ahm’tage?”

Her sweet chirping comes from the bedroom door that leads to the hall.

He’s naked down to the waist, braced above the sink inside the refresher. His pale arms are tensed and corded, beads of cold sweat makes rivulets over the bulging muscle. A syringe trembles in his hand.

He grits against the vicious twist in his guts and calls back lightly, “One moment, dearest.”

“But we’re goin’ to be late,” she whines.

Through the fragrant, clinical-smelling steam leftover from his shower, he can scent her. Sun-warmed skin and sweet, syrupy sex. It’s the same scent he washed off his cock this morning in the shower, which drenches all his clothes so that he smells her even when he’s far from home. The one he loves to paint in his musk and in his come.

He cringes at another searing wrench and huffs, “Never mind that-”

His breath strangles. The syringe clatters into the basin, he grips the lip of the sink and braces as the blue veins in his arms stand and pulse with his snarl. “Bloody hell…”

“Ahm’tage?” his kit’s voice warbles. She sounds nearer this time, “Are you alright?”

Like a titanic shadow through dark waters, his Alpha rises to the surface.

_Breed._

His knuckles turn white as he bears down hard enough to make impressions in the polished steel basin. His wedding band gleams in the sterile light. _No._

“Rey,” his voice is all bass and gravel, “stop.”

With his keen hearing, he picks up the sound of her stockinged feet halting on the flat-woven rug. She is mere inches from the door. He can taste her scent when he swallows.

His blood pounds savagely throughout his body.

“Don’t come in,” he hides his shallow pant from her, “Go to the kitchen and wait for me there.”

She hesitates, drawn both to his voice and by the distress his pheromones are signaling.

“ _Now!”_ he barks, a warning shot.

She receives it, scrambling audibly out of their bedroom towards the hall with a squeak like a gilly-mouse.

He can feel _its_ dissatisfaction roil over his relief. From where he’s still braced against the edge of the basin, he risks a glance at it inside the mirror.

_Alpha._

This creature staring back at him through his sleek, stranded hair does not comprehend. It is a wild thing, burning with reckless, feral hunger. For power. For supremacy. For the sight of its sweet little bitch slow and swollen with its kits in her womb.

It is a predator. A _lunatic._

He despises it.

With supernatural effort, he uncurls one hand and strains towards the syringe lying over the wet drain inside the basin. His whole arm judders, his lips peel back over his teeth.

“Come on,” he hisses, as every cell in his body bears back at him. It does not want to go under, this beast.

It is only getting stronger.

“Come on, _bastard_ …”

Finally, his fingers snatch the barrel of the syringe. His thumb trembles over the plunger as he drags its needle to the juncture in his left arm. The skin is thin, translucent there, riddled with purple pinpricks and dark, mottled veins. As if he’s held a gun to his head, his self-preserving biology clicks on, flooding him with enough adrenaline to make him shake so badly the needle misses twice before biting down. He clenches his eyes and draws a quick series of breaths through his nose as if preparing to dive before he depresses the plunger.

The suppressant _burns_.

It ravages like wildfire, forcing the tendons in his neck stand at attention and his teeth grit so hard they creak. His core cramps, abdominal muscles concaving as he clamps down a scream and convulses soundlessly in the static silence of the refresher.

He will not frighten his kit with hysterics.

This is not her burden to bear.

He gasps when it’s over, shaking over the basin as he spits out bits of phlegm and blood, sweat pricking like frost along his body. The suppressant will burn for more several hours, then eventually settle into a dull, slightly more tolerable smolder.

By the third day, he should hardly notice the pain.

He unfurls his fingers, forcing himself to stand unsupported as he squares back his shoulders and meets his eyes in the mirror. This time, he sees only himself.

_Right then. On with it._

 

 

 

 

“I still don’t see why Roomba can’t come,” she is holding her Alpha’s arm for balance in one hand, the long skirt of her dress gathered up out of the way with the other, so that she can see the seams that run between the floor tiles. She skips over yet another, her cheeks flushed with pride. The ship’s bethel looms at the other end of the corridor, its smooth arched doors open to severe darkness through which she cannot see.

Nearly there, and she hasn’t stepped on a crack _once._

“He’d love church,” she pipes.

Her Alpha, striding measurely beside her, snorts softly. He is dressed in his _regimentals,_ a very fancy version of the uniform he wears when he goes out for work. The coat is much, much longer than his usual; it trails him, fluttering with his steps like the wings of a vulture folded behind its back. The heavy wool is darker than pitch and slightly glossy, with silver-white embroidered emblems that glow like polished moonlight against the black. His chest is absolutely covered in medals.

Her Alpha wins at everything.

“RM-BA is a house-droid,” he explains very patiently, for the bajillionth time, watching amused as she hoppity-hops yet another seam in the tile. Her flat-soled slippers make a sweet _clack-clack_ on the black mirrored tile. “It belongs in the house.”

She huffs, and stops hopping. “Yes, but-”

Suddenly she feels a small weight slip at the waist of her dress.

It is her little pen-blade, the one he gave her to replace the rusted old hook-knife she used to scavenge with. It clatters loudly to the floor.

“Shit,” she chirps, then flushes sheepishly at her Alpha’s gently admonishing glance. “Sorry. Meant _oops…_ ”

“I’m sure,” his lips twitch as he bends gracefully to retrieve the blade.

They’re so close to the chapel she can feel its coolness radiating like breath from its open maw. Above it, the sunken, sharp-edged letters she cannot read reflect back the ship’s blueish light like a set of strange-shaped eyes.

Rather than frighten her, she worries the place feels very sad.

Warmth blooms inside her when her Alpha’s big hands tuck tenderly her knife back into her sash, then reach around her to cinch tighter the loops of her bow.

It’s her favorite dress, long and silky and covered in something called _pea-annies_. She’s never seen one growing wild-like, but her Alpha did bring them back once after one of his trips, a bundle of delicate, sweet-smelling blooms so large she could hardly hold it with her two arms. She tended them devotedly, changing their water and feeding them crushed aspirins and singing to them softly at dinner and at breakfast, and wept pitifully when they finally did wilt away.

Next day, her Alpha came home with a swath of this fabric – white and printed with pea-annies so pale and pretty she could hardly believe they weren’t real – and had a dress made for her.

Her hair is gathered high into a stiff satin bow that matches the blush of her flowers, its loops peek like two pink kitten ears above her head. She likes how her hair swishes side-to-side across her shoulders as she walks, likes it’s whispering to her. Her diamond wedding set winks on her married finger. Small pearls lay nestled at her ears.

She touches one as she looks up into his face, so close now she can see herself in his cool, clearful eyes, and pouts, “If Roomba _did_ come, I’d have one friend.”

His head cocks, light from the tracks above slanting like the flash of a falling star over his gaze. “How do you mean that?”

She hesitates, lowering her eyes to her fingers twisting in front of her sash. She doesn’t like to sound complainly. Master Plutt _hated_ complaining. And the officers’ wives aren’t _so_ mean…

Her Alpha leads her to a shallow alcove off the main corridor where there’s a smooth-planed bench of black stone. Set behind it is a wall covered top-to-bottom with about a billion letters, all raised up instead of sunken in. She used to love to walk slowly with her fingers skimming to feel the ridges, until he told her they’re each the name of a soldier who’s passed away.

She doesn’t like to touch them anymore.

She sits on the bench, but he surprises her by kneeling, his great coat pooling all around him on the floor in front of her. This place is like the rest of the ship, all gleaming black-on-black, so his paleness and the ferocious color of his hair almost blind her when she looks at him.

_Alpha._

He takes her two hands between his much larger ones. His touch, for all his frownliness, is soft and warm.

“My adored one,” his blue eyes search hers closely, “has someone been unkind to you?”

Thinking of the other wives and their sneers and twitters behind their pretty gloves, it’s her turn to snort. _Silly pickle._ “You’re the only person’s ever been not-unkind to me, Ahm’tage. ‘cept for Lady Bazi.”

Of course she means Lady Bazine Netal, the Sith’s _inamorata_. That’s what Alpha calls her, since she and the Sith are unmarried-like. Lady Bazi is gorgeousable, and friendly, and the only other Omega on the ship.

Remembering suddenly, she rushes, “But I know you don’t like me to talk to her, and I haven’t, not _recently_ , since you said. I promise-”

“I’m sure you have not,” he hushes her gently, then looks at her hands in his own. His throat bobs as he swallows, his thumbs make whisper-sounds as they stroke her skin. “Regarding the others-”

Her eyes prick lightly. She twitches her nose to hide it.

“I am so sorry, cherished,” his fingers reach up to treasure softly through the ends of her hair. “Petty jealousy has no regard for class or station, I’m afraid.”

He smiles rueful-like, and her heart skips its beat. It’s a horrible sight, his gaunt cheeks becoming even hollower, eyes squinching faintly under their thick thatch of pale lashes, crinkling the purple wells beneath them as all the lines in his face deepen at once.

He looks like a living skull.

She reaches up to trace the razor-sharp lip of his hairstyle with the tips of her fingers as she sighs dreamily, “You’re so frightening, do you know that? Sometimes I look at you and I want to faint.”

He makes a surprised sound, like a huff, as he gathers her fully into his arms, drawing her to the edge of the bench. His muscles flex around her, caging her in, as his smile coils dangerously around its edges, “Do you really?”

The way he’s looking at her now reminds her of snakes with flickering tongues and of the shelter of his big body arcing over hers and of the hard, aching stretch of his knot in her cunt. There are lizards on Jakku as large as a man which carry their babes in their open jaws. She remembers seeing them, their tiny bead-eyes blinking out at her between long interlocking teeth.

It floods her with warmth.

“I do,” she nuzzles his nose with the button tip of hers. Her chest aches, the rims of her lashes are wet as she blinks. “I love you so much, Ahm’tage.”

“And I you, angel,” he burrows deeper, into the long hair of her ponytail falling sweetly over her shoulder, scenting deeply at her gland. “So very much…”

He smells so good, like clean and laundry starch and musk, his big body hot against her little one.

“Ah,” he says it in her ear like he’s just found the answer to a question written in her scent.

Her heart trips into a race when suddenly, his tongue strokes hot and wet across her gland. His hands close around her waist, so big they touch behind and in front of her. His dark murmur makes her breath snare and her head tip and her eyes flicker shut.

“You’ll heat soon.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Of course._

He waits in full uniform under the pure-white tube lights of the examination room, having declined both to change into the ridiculous backless gown and to sit on the padded gurney beside the terminal. His kit does though, her wriggly little bottom crinkling its sterile liner as she perches on the paper and preens him, picking bits of lint off his shoulders and smoothing his already tightly-gelled hair while she makes up tuneless little songs under her breath to amuse herself.

“I love Ahm’tage, he is tall and white and mean… He loves work and rules and me…”

Now that he has detected her oncoming heat, a slight tang to her usual signature, metallic like blood but with a note of something richer, something _fertile_ , it is all he can scent. His mind reels, turning over and over what should have been obvious to him weeks ago.

With her heat approaching, and with the threat of instability pressing in from all corners, the question of her safety has woken his _other_ from its induced slumber. Even now, as her sweet whisper-singing lulls him to peace, he can feel the strong, steady drum of its instinct through the sear of the anti-serum. Its primitive murmur pounds like a second heartbeat through his blood, _Hide bitch breed bitch mark bitch feed bitch guard bitch cannot run too slow cannot fight too small protectprotectprotect-_

_Kill the rivals._

“Ahm’tage?”

He’s mortified to realize he’s just growled.

It’s that long, low shear of air over his vocal chords, twice as thick as a beta’s and flanged, which creates the low, deadly rumble that is the hallmark of all Alphas. An overture to something beyond deadly.

His control is slipping away.

On her hands and knees atop the examination table, his kit studies him very closely. Her head is cocked, long glossy ponytail falling beautifully past her shoulder towards the floor. She looks curious and, he thinks, vaguely concerned.

Her Alpha seldom snarls.

“Forgive me, cherished,” he steps closer, bending down as she rises up onto her knees and wraps her slender arms about his neck. Their foreheads met in a tender touch.

_I am not an animal._

Behind her, the little pads of her bare toes peep out from the hem of her dress. Where her shoes are, he cannot begin to guess.

“Am I sick?” she asks, as though she’s wondering if it’s teatime. “Is that why we didden go to church and came to hospital instead?”

His big hand smooths over her hair, counting its silky ends between his fingertips as he assures her mildly, “No, my dove. You are perfectly well.”

“Oh.” He can practically see the wheels churning behind her honey-colored eyes, “But then… does that mean… are you sick?” her small hands come up to cup his jaw, “Oh no, please say that you aren’t-”

“I am not,” his hands close gently around her wrists. Already, she has begun to cry.

The paper liner crackles softly beneath her knees as he enfolds her fully within his arms. He tucks her in at his neck so that her nose nuzzles his gland, letting his scent soothe her as he shushes her with soft strokes and tender murmurs into her ear.

For all her bold twittering and frolic, his kit is quite an anxious little bird. Always fretful he’ll vanish in a flash on the horizon, dissolving like a mirage, leaving her exactly as he found her.

Utterly alone.

“There there, none of that now. I’m quite alright. Just a bit of routine bloodwork, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up over. Hush, my love-”

 _It was a mistake to bring her here,_ he realizes _._

Seizing on a small metal stand of steel instruments beside the table, he tells her, “Look here, my darling.”

He selects the one he thinks will fascinate her most and holds it up near his chest so she may see it. “What’s this, hm?”

He rattles it enticingly

She peeks out from the crook of his neck and gives a watery little sniffle. “Dunno…”

“Allow me,” gingerly, he tucks one of its rubber-tipped prongs into her ear and slips its mate into his own. He then threads the long, thin tube that connects them through her arm so that he may press its metal bell between them, against his chest.

Through the prong he hears the warbled scratch of the bell-piece against the brushed wool of his uniform coat.

“Wait for it,” he murmurs mysteriously, pretending to concentrate intensely as she watches, “it must be somewhere… just about… _ah_. There-”

From the depths of his chest, the dulled, staccato beat of his heart emerges.

Instantly, she perks. “Ahm’tage-”

“Now, what do you suppose that is?” The corners of his eyes crease with mirth.

“It’s your heart-beep,” she awes, looking up and to the corner as her pretty frown melts into still more beautiful dimples.

He cannot help but laugh.

Smiling, she closes her eyes to savor the sound of it through their stethoscope.

“There now,” his eyes are lit with love as he traces her features still cradled against him. _Such a pretty, pretty girl._ “Does that sound like the heart of a sick man to you, Misses Hux?”

“Never,” she shakes her head emphatically. It makes a muffled rustle through the prongs. “May I please hear mine now?”

“I insist.”

Very gently, he presses the bell against her small, firm breast. Even though she is wearing fewer layers, her heartbeat is slight and quick compared to his own; it beats like the flutter of wings.

“My my my, someone sounds excited,” he murmurs. They’re so close his rumble comes through the scope.

She tries to draw him down by her hand cupped behind him as her eyes drift over his mouth. “Make it go faster.”

His hooded gaze glints in a way that should frighten her as he takes her small waist within his two hands. He feels the outline of her pen-blade inside her pink sash and smirks down at her, chest smarting with vicious pride. “And how shall I do that, pray?”

She isn’t frightened, rather she presses closer and parts her small, plush lips. The warm, sensual scent of her arousal paints the air as, through the scope, he hears her heart skitter to a race.

“Oh, please kiss me, Ahm’tage,” she begs so sweetly, “ _please?_ I’ll die if you don’t.”

How can he refuse her?

He swoops in to steal her next breath, relishing her delighted gasp when his tongue slips inside her without preamble. She opens fully to his conquest, tilting eagerly so that he may reach along her upper palate all the way back to the tight case of her throat.

When his big hands cup her breasts through her dress and grope firmly, they both moan.

Like the well-worn groove born by pestle into mortar, her body slots into the hollow made by his as he crowds himself around her. Their kiss finds a slow, erotic rhythm, lips pressing softly then pulling apart as his tongue strokes into her over and over, a sensual loop that mimics the tempo of his hips when he takes her. He is drowning in the wet, velvet heat of her mouth and the hot little whimpers she makes for him, coupled with her heart beating fast enough to burst through the stethoscope still trapped against her breast. His blood buzzes as his hands slip all over her small, soft body, touching her everywhere through the smooth fabric of her dress. Through his uniform, he feels her nipples straining taut against his chest. How she trembles for him, aroused to the point of ache by his kisses and by his touch.

His ego swallows him whole.

The paper liner tears as she sits back on her heels, dragging him with her by her arms wound ever-so-tightly around his neck. He grips her plump, pert bottom and squeezes, relishing the way she whines for him. She mewls helplessly when he draws her bottom lip between his and suckles, drenching the room in her scent.

“Alpha,” she mews like a kitten into their kiss. Drawing her knees level with her belly, she parts her thighs beneath her dress. The smell of her slick tinged with heat barrels into him like a freight-craft, his entire existence narrows to a single thought.

_Breed._

With his tongue seated fully inside her, he palms her sex and pictures how pretty she’ll look on his knot.

The pneumatic doors _whissh_ open.

“We have your results back, General, and I’m afraid they’re exactly not as we had hoped- _good Lord!”_

Through a maelstrom of medical printouts tossed up in a panic, he sees a man in a long white coat scramble back for the door. A second later, it clicks why.

He is _roaring._

His entire face is contorted with it, lips pulled so far back he feels the dry, cool air on his gums. The vibrations rattle the paneling on the terminal as spit trails one corner of his mouth towards the floor. The hair at the back of his neck stands at attention and his nostrils flare, scenting for challenge, while his heart thrashes like it’s coming for the other man. At the end of his outstretched arm, clenched expertly in his furious grip, a short, sharp object glints like a fang in the track-light.

His kit’s pen-blade.

She is lying very still on the table behind him, legs closed around his hand that cupped her sex and knees curled into her chest. His tall, broader body eclipses her smaller one, her eyes glow large and catlike from the shadow he casts over her. She looks vaguely worried for the man in the lab coat.

“Easy, General,” the interloper breathes. Slowly, he raises his arms above his head and lowers himself to the floor.

The stench of fear fills the room.

_Beta._

But what is it doing _here_?

“It’s Doctor Branson, head of the medical staff aboard _The Supremacy,_ ” the man’s voice is breathless and purposely benign. His hands shake as he speaks to a spot on the tile near the General’s boots.

The General’s skeletal sneer widens. He should rip out its throat and skin it, hang its hide outside his lair and let its rot mix with his musk as a warning to others, _Keep away from my bitch, keep away from my kits-_

“You’re in the infirmary, General,” the beta continues, risking a glance up into his face. Whatever he sees there makes him flinch and huddle as his hands lift higher still, “You came here this morning, to have your blood drawn. You said you were feeling strange, sir. Feeling… _off_. You said your kit was going into heat-cycle. Do you recall that? Do you recall coming here for an examination, with your wife, General Hux?”

_General Hux. General. Hux. Hux…_

Awareness starts to trickle in as his heartrate climbs down from the ceiling.

He remembers talking to his kit in the alcove beside the bethel, her hands in his and her pretty flower dress, the walk to the infirmary, her charming prattle as a drone drew his blood, chiding her not to muddle with its flashlight-

The missing Sith. The riots. Rey’s heat.

The knife slips from his grip and clatters as he presses his palm to his forehead and digs. Something cold and ominous settles like a pit in his gut.

_Dear God, what have I done?_

“Doctor Branson, forgive me-”

He is across the room in three great strides, reaching down to help the poor fellow off the floor. 

The good doctor is clammy, pale and badly shaken. But relieved.

“I don’t know what’s come over me, I-” the General looks to his wife. She is watching him from the exam table, unusually subdued. “I can’t explain it. It's as if I totally lost control.”

“Believe me, old boy,” the doctor clasps his arm and wobbles up unsteadily. With tremulous fingers, he rights his glasses, “this only the beginning.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh-oh. Hux is about to go full-metal Alpha, the crime families are closing in, and no one knows where the Sith is?
> 
> That can't be good.
> 
> More inappropriate sexing and a little kit-napping, anyone? ( :


	5. Neither angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's just a weensy bit of light choking. Just a small, consensual smackeral. Oh, and some feels.
> 
> As ever, read the taggity waggities.

_Myocardial infarction._

He turns the term over and over in his mind, as one worries a coin between one’s fingers. Sitting in a chair pulled up to the lip of the bathing tub, he is still partially dressed in his regimentals, legs stretched out before him, jacket off, house shoes on, shirtsleeves rolled up to the crook of his arms. He feels hyperaware of his heart thudding steadfastly behind his ribs.

 _“The cause is overdose. A single vial of suppressant is meant to be taken once every year. You’ve taken four vials in three months,”_ Doctor Branson had held a vial in his hand for emphasis as he peered sternly over the rim of his glasses. _“Frankly General, you have a much bigger concern than your Alpha tendencies presenting through the anti-serum.”_

The General glanced through the viewport in the door into the small bay where his kit was kneeling on the polished tile, playing with the med drones while she waited for him to finish. Her new stethoscope around her neck, she spoke in a sweet, piping voice, her long ponytail draping over her shoulder as she took their temperatures and peered at their sensors with a pen-light.

Watching her, so gentle and vulnerable and small, his hands clenched where they were folded behind him. _“What could possibly be worse than turning into a feral, rutting monster?”_

The doctor removed his glasses. His expression looked painfully sad. _“Your heart is dying.”_

He had no idea.

It seems quite impossible even now, as his heart continues to beat automatically, uninformed of its impending calamity. If he does not stop the suppressants, it will surely fail. But if he does-

A sudden splash dapples his knee in warm, sweet-smelling water.

He looks down to see his kit submerged to the tops of her small breasts in milky, fragrant rosewater. Her hair is gathered becomingly on top of her head, small tendrils reach down to tickle her tanned, freckled shoulders, glistening like sand dunes glazed gold by the sun. Her face is rosy and glowing from the thick, warm steam wafting off the softly rippling surface of the waters. She skips her fingertips along the lip of the tub and shines up at him, dimples on full-blast.

His chest wrings hot.

_What will happen to my love?_

“Young lady,” he affects the stern, lordly tone that makes her giggle, “ _what_ have I told you about frolicking in the bath?”

“But I’m _not_ a lady,” she slaps the water for emphasis, smiling wildly as she insists, “I’m a _mermaid_.”

To prove it, she curls her shoulder to her cheek and batts her long, dark lashes. Her little cherry-tipped breast peeks at him above the surface.

Was there ever a more lovely girl?

“Hmm, rather a queer little mermaid, aren’t you?” he frowns, schooling himself to look dubious rather than smirking at her affronted little _uh!_ She’s too peeved to notice his hand slipping below the water as he leans to peer more closely at her sun-speckled face, “Are you sure you’re not a barrafish? Or an eeling, perhaps?”

“Nooo, I’m a mer- _ah!_ ” she shrieks as suddenly he tickles her bare belly. “Ahm’tage wait, s’no fair! You aren’t even tick’lish!”

She tries to catch his arm, but he’s too quick for her, worming out of her slight, slippery grasp as he works her little body over in the places he knows she’s most sensitive. Under her arms, just below her belly button, on the soft insides of her thighs. Water sloshes generously over the lip of the tub, puddling on the slick tile and soaking the soles of his house shoes as she wriggles and frisks, dashing her bath with frantic slaps as she trills, breathless and shrill with delight. He’s soaked in the rose-scented water and her laughter that rebounds sharp and sweet off every surface of the refresher.

“Time out, time out!” she caws, throwing up her hands and beating the fingertips of one into the palm of the other, “I said time out you have to stop!”

He does stop, fingers poised above the water, finding himself on his knees in front of the tub to better reach her. His slacks are wet through and plastered to his shins and thighs. His dark dress shirt is equally drenched, it clings to the fine definition in his chest. Oily pearls of rosewater tremor on the stranded ends of his hair hanging loose in his eyes, they plink his nose and race each other down his gaunt jaw as he studies her in the warm light.

She is vision, panting and trembling with pleasurable excitement, her whole body above the water beaded and glistening like a living fantasy. Her long hair has come down from its elegant pile, dappled with diamond-light and clinging to her wet breasts and trailing ethereally around her waist. She blinks, and droplets drip like tears from her lashes onto her flushed cheeks.

 _Mermaid, indeed,_ he thinks, chest tight and breath bated by her beauty in this moment.

“You almost fainted me!” she chides him breathlessly.

He is not the least bit contrite.

“Come here,” he tells her, low and rumbling like far-off thunder, eyes hooded with want. He is deeply pleased when her slick rushes in response to the bass in his voice, flooding the room that’s already enveloped by the warm, sensual steam from her bath.

His cock begins to stir.

She drifts closer, tilting and tipping her chin to give him just one eye, like a little baby bird. She touches her fingertips to her shoulders as she flirts shyly, “Who, me?”

“Yes you, little girl,” his tenor becomes even deeper, darker as he crooks his finger and growls, “Come here.”

Her breath snares. She blushes all the way to her breasts.

As he leans in over the rim of the tub, staring trance-like into her large, golden eyes, he feels something shift beneath his skin. Something primitive and immutable. Something powerful. It rises against his conscious, against his self-control.

“Alpha,” she breathes, looking back at him. Her lips are so close he can feel her warm whisper on his lips. _Alpha…_

From deep within his chest, a sound rolls forth, churning and rhythmic and primal. It’s unlike any he’s ever made before, wafting rich and thick like smoke up through his lungs and pouring over her like baptism.

She’s made him purr.

There is no time to feel mortified as the water ripples all around her, making fast liquid sounds as it waves up the sides of the tub and splatters the floor around him. Suddenly, her wet, slender arms are around him, holding tightly to his neck as she presses herself against his heart. Her small fingers twine within his hair, she bathes his face in open kisses and hot licks of her tongue as she cries, “Alpha… Alpha…”

The scent of her arousal strangles him. His rumbling grows louder and louder still as her tongue presses into his mouth.

_Mine._

He catches her face between his large, hard hands as, in one fluid motion, he stands and steps into the tub. Warm water rushes and fills his house shoes, weighing down his feet as he kneels to take her into his arms. More of it displaces over the lip of the bathtub, flooding the floor of the refresher unheeded as their tongues twine desperately, lips slotting and slanting in slow, sensual turns as they search every inch of each other’s mouths. Her hands trapped between their bodies slip-slide over the sleek molded fabric of his dress shirt, she tugs and wrenches at the buttons until they snap and ricochet off the tile. Her small fingertips on his hot, wet skin is an epiphany, he redoubles his kiss, hand behind her head fisting in her hair to hold her as the other winds around her waist to bring their bodies closer. She straddles his thigh, grinding her soaked little sex against the muscle bulging there so that her heat burns him through his slacks.

He is _on fire_ for her.

With a low snarl, he wrings her head back and bites her gland.

She arcs and keens in his arms. “ _Yes!”_

His blood is pounding too fast through his body, making his head swim and his cock throb where it strains between his legs as they work her over onto her knees with her bare breasts pressed against the rim of the tub. Everything seems to slip in his grasp as he fumbles to unbuckle his belt and shove his slacks off his hips. His cock springs forth furious and leaking, harder than he’s ever seen it. The knot at its base is already burgeoning, blueish veins along his shaft stand and pulse as he takes her tiny waist in his hands.

She looks back at him over her shoulder, panting open-mouthed at the sight of him towering above her, his fierce-colored hair hanging down in his eyes, cheeks taut and hollow with the clench in his jaw, shirt soaked and half-torn from his lean, muscular body, all the tendons in his big hands standing out against the smooth, delicate curve of her back above her ass.

They’re both shaking as she reaches greedily for his shaft.

At this angle, bowed as she is, her small pink folds are already parted, showing off her swollen little hood and her wet, clenching entrance. He watches transfixed as she drags him there, cold blue eyes raking over her cunt and the pale swell of her pert little ass. When his thick, weeping crown brushes her opening, she arches deeper inside his grasp.

_All mine. Only mine. Mine forever-_

He bucks into her without preamble.

She throws back her head and shrieks.

There is no one to hear her but Alpha.

He’s never taken her like this before, so forcefully, so wantonly, as if he’ll die if he does not. He beats into her savagely, wordlessly, snarling and roaring like a wild animal as water surges violently over the rim of the tub. Her pussy is so tight and tender around him, tensing piteously when he plunges deep, then strangling to hold him back as he withdraws. His knot batters her sex as his balls swing and slap at her navel, making a wet, lewd _smack_ that rivals the sloshing of her cunt and his vicious panting and her sharp shriek each time he strikes her womb.

“Alpha!” she shrills his designation over and over and over, a prayer for absolution he will not answer, “Alpha- Alpha-ah-”

He folds over her, burrowing his nose in her hair and baring down until her head bows and she offers him her vulnerable nape. Her mating gland, marked overlappingly with the brand of his teeth, burns hot against his chest as he mouths and laves her above the first notch of her spine. Her little belly sags further towards the bath, she rests her head on her arm and grips the tile, knuckles turning the purest hue of white, as her other hand curls around his big fingers digging into her waist and squeezes as if she means to never let go.

“Harder,” she sobs.

His open pant curves into a skeletal grin as he obliges.

She keens, long and low and soft.

He doesn’t know how it happens, what alchemy of lust and love and dark, carnal desire possess him to do it, but he uncurls one huge hand from the tender flesh of her waist and reaches up between her breasts and collars her. His fingertips find her glands at either side of her throat, he squeezes as he lifts her bodily away from the wall of tub so that her back is flush against his front. The rush of power it gives him when her head tips all the way back against his chest and she stares up at him wide-eyed, shocked into silence, her hands clenched around the thick, veined column of his forearm, her little pussy pulsing and gushing helplessly as her lashes flicker and her tongue lolls out, is indescribable.

 _This_ is who they are.

He tells her so, haltingly, whisperingly, with adoration creasing the very corners of his cold blue eyes as he fucks her for all that he’s worth. “My good… sweet… girl… take my cock… like you were… made for… my only… love-”

“Yes,” she whimpers, tears slipping down her cheeks and pattering onto his wrist. Their mouths are so close he can taste the devotion on her tongue, “yes, yes…”

Her belly begins to tense, quaking inside the iron clamp of his arm. He squeezes harder at her neck, wringing the tender ache inside her glands with her crown cradled safely against his heart, and is rewarded when her lashes flicker and her cunt flutters and her breathing stutters out.

At some primal, sacred urging, he tells her, graveling and hard, “Good bitch. Good, good bitch. Come on Alpha’s cock.”

Her eyes, like her mouth, open wider and wider as, breathlessly, her whole body strains within his hold, arching hard as she comes.

He dips his tongue down her throat to savor her devastation.

Her orgasm is infinite and sweet.

She coats him in a rush of slick so hot he thinks he’ll melt, so thick it trickles audibly into the water below them as finally she lets out a scream. Her pussy ratchets tighter and tighter around him, so that he can hardly withdraw from her, trying to drag him and hold him at the mouth of her womb. Balls blazing and spine stacking tight, he is eager to oblige her, ramming his hips to drive home his knot. He splits her suddenly, violently, and locks inside her, drinking in her soft, pitiful wailing and weak struggle. His tongue laves her in hot, soothing slathers before he cups her chin in his hand and forces her to look up into his eyes.

“Alpha’s going to fill his little bitch with come.”

“Yes,” she croaks desperately, nodding inside his grip as her eyes roll back and she shudders. “Yes Alpha please-”

When the first spasm takes hold of him, he throws his head back and roars hard enough to rattle the mirror over the basin. His bones shake, he thinks the stars shake with him as the Galaxy whites out in a flash.

She hugs his arm between her breasts and whimpers, “So full...”

The room rushes and swells with the endless crests of his orgasm, erupting so fiercely he jerks and shouts with each one until his back aches and his cries turn hoarse. His come overflows her, bulging her belly in his hand and leaking out around his knot into the water in feathery tendrils of slow-sinking white. His heart thrashes like it’s coming through his ribs for her, his eyes won’t stop moving behind his mostly closed lids, as if to take in all of heaven before he comes down.

When the ringing finally fades from his ears, he finds her lolling within his arms, touching trembling chapped-lipped kisses on his cheek and his neck. He rests his forehead on her shoulder and tries to catch his breath, still spasming with the intermittent jets of his cock.

“ _That_ ,” she pants softly, breath tickling his hair as her juddering fingertips stroke it back. Her eyelids droop peacefully, “was magnifable.”

He lets out a hoarse, barking laugh that ends in a groan as another rush of come bursts through his loins and coats her. His clothes cling to him, he feels as if he’ll never stand properly again so long as he lives.

“Yes,” shakily, he lifts a hand out of the water at her waist to gently fondle her breast as he turns to nuzzle her ear, “It rather was.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nestled in the concave of his body reclined back against the tub, surrounded by the sure strength of his arms and caught fast upon his knot, his kit drifts in and out of slumber. He’s shucked his sopping clothes and house shoes and refilled their hot water, holding her against his chest with one arm and murmuring sweetly into her hair as he added the lathers and oils she prefers. Their house drone, an RM unit, had already sent his wet things down the laundry chute and was quietly working its way around the refresher, suctioning up water and polishing the floor while emitting the occasional soothing chirp.

The room is full of fragrant steam, pressing down like a warm cover, making the air thick and sweet to breathe. His head tips back, lolling against the towel his drone was good enough to place there for him. Beneath the water, his big fingertips strum softly at her belly, as inside her, his cock continues to pulse. The doctor’s warning and the burgeoning riots seem a thousand lightyears away now. In this moment, he knows only peace.

“Ahm’tage?”

He realizes he’d begun to drift off as he stirs slightly, tipping his chin to gaze half-lidded down at her frazzled crown. “What is it, my dove?”

He feels, rather than sees, her sleepy smile against his chest.

Surely, he can never die.

“When there’s a baby inside me, will I go see Doctor Branson?”

Now _that_ gets his rapt attention. His eyes open fully to the low yellow light. “I’m sorry, when there’s a what?”

“A baby,” she tilts back to look at him. Her eyes shine with love, and something… else. Something anticipating. Something _soft_. “You know. After I heat and all, and you mate me, I’ll have a baby.”

She cups her hand over his and presses tenderly into her navel.

His eyes prickle suddenly, unbidden. His throat goes desperately dry.

Before he can stop them, images fall softly past his eyes, jewel-toned and dazzling as autumn leaves drifting across a crisp, blue sky. Of his kit flushed and sweetly swollen, tucked away inside a nest of soft offerings and lavish furs. Of a tiny, mewling bundle sheltered in the crook of his arm. Of love redoubled, and life everlasting through precious legacy.

_Children._

A secret, almost shameful longing unfurls inside his chest, rankling him tenderly as it spirals like a universe of stillborn stars.

_Alas…_

“My darling,” his thumb strokes gently along her navel, where he is hilted in her even now. Though he knows not why, his voice is thick with some sad emotion as he tells her quietly, “We will not have kits for some time yet. You are still much too small, here-”

He lifts his hand from the wedge she’s created, trailing tinkling droplets of water as he brushes his fingertips across her heart, “- and here.”

“But Doctor Branson says I am getting stronger,” she turns within the circle of his embrace and lays her little hands on his chest. Her tone is urgent, her mouth trembling, “Remember? Last time he said all my blood was good, and I’m almost big as I should be-”

“Almost, but not quite,” it still pains him to recall how thin she was when he found her, her little belly slightly distended from ravenous hunger, her lips cracked and white from thirst. She spent her first three days aboard the _Supremacy_ tucked away inside a bacta cradle, receiving nourishment from tubes.

 _“She won’t recover overnight,”_ the good doctor had braced him sternly, _“she’ll take a great deal of looking after. And-”_ here he’d glanced tactfully at his clip-chart, _“given her sustained levels of malnourishment at such a tender stage of life, she… may never conceive. And her chances of bearing a child to term are- well. At any rate, I thought you’d want to know, as it may influence your decision to keep her. I know how crucial fertility is to your- ah. There are, of course, many fine schools and such where you may send her, if you decide to do so. She shall be grateful, I should think, either way.”_

Of course, he hadn’t been able to part with her. The very thought was unbearable to him. It was not in an Alpha’s nature to reject such a vulnerable, needful kitling, and it was not in his character to renege on a promise made to a sweet young girl. He was a man of his word, and neither her health nor her difficulties mattered to him. Though he was over twice her age, and many times above her station, he had married her ardently, grateful she would accept him.

Time had only deepened his thanksgiving. Now, after nearly three months as her protector and her provider, as her _lover_ , he felt he possessed the greatest treasure in all the Galaxy.

No harm would befall her, so long as he drew breath.

“My darling girl,” he clucks soothingly, thumbing away the tears collected along her lashes that threaten to fall, “take heart. All things in good time.”

“But won’t you be dis’ppointed?” her voice is warbling and childishly small, “Oh I want so much to be correct for you. I really do.”

He strokes a tendril back from her cheek. “You are perfection, my angel. I know you’ll think me wickedly selfish-”

“I couldn’t-” she starts to insist, but he hushes her tenderly.

“I would like to keep you to myself just a bit longer.” Gently, he peels her hand from his chest and laces her tiny fingers through his own. “I’ve only just found you, you see, and no matter how much I try, I simply cannot get enough of you. The thought of sharing you so soon with another- well it makes me rather jealous.”

His sentiments, he realizes somewhat sheepishly, are quite the truth.

“Well,” she preens shyly, flushed from his praise, “maybe… I wouldn’t want you to feel left out…”

He pauses kissing her fingertips one-by-one. “Quite.”

“But it innit ‘cause you don’t want one. My baby, I mean,” she searches his face closely for a trace of deception.

He has none to give.

“Absolutely. I want all there is of you, for all your life. But my angel, we are in no rush,” he taps the end of her little button nose, a sense of warmth replacing the ache in his chest when she smiles. Her eyes shine up at him with unadulterated love.

“We have all the time in the Galaxy.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He is dreaming about a white cottage set back in a field of wild flowers. Their long, fragile stems bow beneath the weight of their glorious crowns.

He stands on a hillside looking out over their undulating mass, an ocean of mixed colors it strains the eye to see. The cottage in their midst he knows is his own. How he knows, he cannot say, only that he is saturated in the knowledge. It lives deep within his bones.

It is on fire.

He wakes gasping to the persistent _bleep-bleep_ of his house drone. They are in bed together, he and his kit, lying as they always do, with her small body nested in his own, his arms around her, chest pressed to her back, one knee slotted between hers and his chin notched over her crown. Her hands are gathered up to her chest as if in prayer.

The chronometer on the bedside table reads _oh-four-hundred-hours._

“Alright _alright_ ,” he hisses at the chirping RM unit, already easing himself from their entanglement as it idles anxiously beside the bed, “Keep your bloody antenna on and for God’s sake, droid _lower your tone.”_

Below his breath, he curses his house shoes still drying on the lip of the tub as he wraps his robe around him.

His little dove stirs the sheets but does not wake.

“Well,” he snaps near-silently at the drone, tossing his hand at the door, “if you’d be so kind.”

It leads him at a brisk clip down the hall to the home’s foyer, beep-booping all the while. He has never been very good at understanding these machines, it’s something Rey very much excels at but he’s never applied himself to grasp. He is regretting that now, as he grapples to understand its muddled message.

“Lieutenant Mitaka… urgent… in-person… deplaned… what the devil are you on about?”

He doesn’t have to wonder long, because the moment he steps into the private lobby, he is sprung upon by the young lieutenant.

And Captain Phasma is with him.

“This had better be nothing short of catastrophe,” he warns them both imperiously.

Phasma says nothing. Her sharp-featured face is pale and drawn.

“It’s the Sith, sir,” Mitaka informs him flinchingly, “he’s dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, shit's about to get *real*.
> 
> I want to say thank you to all of you who have commented, kudo-ed, and subbed. I know this is a trope within a trope within a trope, like Trope-ception, and your comments especially are so encouraging and deeply appreciated.
> 
> Hope you're having a gorgeousable week : )


	6. Love is like the wild

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is so long I've broken it into two parts

The throne room is ice cold.

It creates a kind of cognitive dissonance, the freezing, fast-cycling air a jarring juxtaposition to the hellish drapery and red glaze of light flooding up from the floors. Much like the Supreme Leader’s appearance, the General can only guess it is meant to unbalance the mind.

After a decade of loyal service to his Excellence Leader Snoke, the General should be used to seeing a hundred-year-old beta male gliding about in a glimmering ball gown. Yet, the gnarled form garbed in swaths of shimmering gold never ceases to disturb him.

This night is no exception. The sorcerer sweeps back-and-forth before him, pacing like a caged loth-beast in his nearly-sheer gown. He gesticulates wildly, using his twisted hands to punctuate his hissing rasps. A cobra in a gilt sack, poised to strike.

“ _Sabotage_. It is the Jedi Order. All this time, they have been in hiding, _plotting_ their moment at which to strike. My apprentice-”

“Supreme Leader,” the General stands in a simple approximation of his uniform, hair still slightly untamed from sleep. He aims his tone for patience, and misses the mark, “Neither Lord Ren’s body nor that of his paramour’s was recovered from the wreckage. We cannot assume he is dead-”

The creature before him is not bound to any natural rhythms. It is a restless, craving thing that ceases its pacing and wilts back into its throne. “His signature has disappeared from the Force.”

_Not the bloody Force-_

Suppressing a sigh, the General’s hands fold benignly behind his back. “Sir. I cannot presume to understand the... nature of this _Force,_ as you call it. I can, however, present to you the facts. Which are, at this very moment, that we have not found Lord Ren’s body, and we have no evidence to support the theory that a new order of mystical insurrectors have arisen from the ashes of Luke Skywalker-”

“You,” Leader Snoke broils dangerously, “ _dare_ mock me?”

 _Patience, old boy, patience,_ he reminds himself.

“No, Your Excellence. I am merely suggesting that there may be an alternative explanation. That the disappearance of Ren’s… signature, as you say, is merely in correlation with his disappearance, and not indicative of its causality.”

Leader Snoke’s fingertips steeple. “Then what do you _suggest_ is the cause, General?”

Hatred pricks along the General’s hackles. A sinister, sluicing murmur snarls up his spine.

_Beta. Strike-_

_Steady on._

He lifts his chin and speaks calmly. “The crime families, Your Excellence. I believe they are connected to the crash of his convoy and to his disappearance.”

“The… crime… families…” Leader Snoke sinks back. His smirk morphs into a mirthless, seething laugh. “Your naiveté amuses me, General. This is the work of Skywalker,” he leans over his arm and hissed, “Make no mistake…”

_Fool. He is weak. Snap his neck. Take his throne. All of them will bow-_

“The work of a dead man? Whose own body Your Excellency personally saw jettisoned into the cold reaches of the Dead Zone? Hardly. Supreme Leader, let us not get distracted,” his cool, cultured voice rises above the clamor and roil behind his heart, “Our goal-”

Instinct warns him a second before the Darkshear strikes.

It lashes across his spine like a bolt of blue lightening, blasting him back twenty feet. His limbs seize painfully, unable to control the movement of his muscles as he slides over the sleek tile reflecting back the hell-glaze of the flood lights. His teeth gnash, every nerve ending on fire as he slavers and snarls, lips peeling back over his teeth. Rage-blind, he clambers to attack.

And is struck again.

This time, he lets out a sound like a baleful howl as his back bows in a perfect arch up off the floor. His joints crack, all the tendons in his neck stand at attention as his heart stops and restarts in a violent loop of feedback.

The pain is indescribable.

When it is over, he lies panting and spasming on the floor.

“Go to Canto Bite,” Leader Snoke bids him from his throne. His tone is tender, paternal. Laced in a poisoned edge. “Search Ren’s craft yourself. Do not come back until you know where the new Jedi have taken his body, and where they are hiding-”

The General starts to speak then sputters, choked by the bile and bits of his tongue he spits out onto his reflection looking back at him from the floor. His mouth is steeped in blood.

As if from a black well of rage inside of him, his instinct claws upwards towards consciousness. Ravening snarls and ferocious, spit-stringed snaps of a razor-fanged jaw. Over the swamp of impulse drowning out his reason like a miasma – _ripkillsnap –_ one thought eclipses them all.

_Rey._

“My w-wife-” he groans, in a voice not at all like his own. He toils, trying work himself to standing. But his legs shake, too weak to find purchase against the glossy tile. “She is h-heating- she needs-”

_Alpha. She needs her Alpha. Alpha protect-_

His innards seize. He swallows back a retch and moans.

“I fail to see how that is my problem, General.”

The General’s hands tremble. He balls them into fists and grinds his teeth. “I cannot- leave her- alone-”

Leader Snoke stands. “If you do not find the Jedi Order and bring them to me, General, I shall snap your little bitch’s neck myself. Am I clear?”

Fear. What a clarifying emotion.

Slowly, with devastating effort, the General raises his head where it hangs down between his shoulders. Each movement needles inside the still-spasming nerves of his neck. Blood and spittle drip from his chin to the floor.

Like a serpent’s coils, instinct loops around him.  

 _Dead man,_ it hisses, as he meets the eyes of last man to ever threaten his kit.

“Absolutely,” he agrees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You really shouldn’t challenge him,” as always, the Captain offers her sage counsel post-fact. “He is deranged.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” the General sneers lightly. Then he winces as she injects another electro-diffuser into his arm. His dress shirt is off, she’s used it to swob the blood and spit off his face and chest. Her droid has gone to fetch a new one.

They sit alone inside her office, with no light on but the desk lamp, casting a faint yellow halo through the dark.

Finally, _finally_ , his heartrate begins to climb down. Relieved, he closes his eyes and leans back against wall behind him. She drug him back to her office, single-handedly with his arm slung over her shoulders and his polished boots chirping along the floor. All the while with his eyes rolling back and practically foaming at the mouth.

He smirks ruefully.

_Doctor Branson will be thrilled to hear about this._

“We cannot go on like this,” he says.

Beside him, where she’s bundling off his soiled clothes for the incinerator, she snorts. “Are you speaking personally or for the royal _we_?”

“Gwyneth,” his eyes open. He finds her staring intensely at him through the dark. “The Empire cannot go like this. You know that.”

She sighs. “What’s the alternative, then?”

He looks past her into the shadows. “I hardly know.”

_But it cannot be like this._

The silence draws taut between them. It is she who breaks it, with a second long, humorless sigh.

“Well, better get on to the showers then.”

He blinks, “I beg your pardon.”

She rolls her eyes, jerks her chin at the door. “Go and use the privates’ barracks by the galley. They’re all off-ship on exercises. And be liberal with the soap. Because if that little bitch of yours scents blood on you-” she ignores his scathing look and gives him a cockeyed smirk.  _Ever the cheeky Alpha._

“She’ll be caterwauling all night.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her first night on Jakku, Rey didn’t sleep a blink.

 

She kept curled up under the counter her master had haggled with her mother over. Ended up he paid twenty-two credits and a fifth of germ-whiskey for the little girl with banged up knees and a ‘petually runny nose, who cried the whole day and long into the night with her skinny little arms wrapped tightly around her skinnier shins. In the morning, he came round the stall and whapped her with his cane, real smart-like.

 _“Look alive, girl!”_ he koo-a-rooed, like some great bald fowl crowing at the sunrise. _“S’hard day’s work ahead of yah, if you have any hopes of eating. So look alive, I say, look alive!”_

She took a lotta whaps from that cane while she learned what was expected of her in her new life. Loads of crawling round small spaces inside ships hot enough to cook a loaf, metal burning her palms and knees through her wrappings so bad her blisters had blisters, unscrewing parts with tools so badly bent up she had to work her fingers on the razoring threads until they bled. Midday when the sun looked down on her and all the world like a scorching eye, the slaves would stop and scrub parts under the shade of a canvas pitch, and be grateful for it. Then she would swob down the master’s stall, getting it spic and span-like, which was an impossible thing to ask for, really, considerin’ all the dust that was in the air and down inside her very lungs. All for a nip of portion at the end of the day, and the privilege of balling up beneath his counter for safe-keeping at night.

Like him or not, Plutt was a jealous master, he would not stand for any one of his slaves getting snatched or bothered. No sir. If ever anyone did try snatchin’ her – and they did, plenty – they got a galaxy of hurt from Plutt’s cane.

But all changed the day she presented.

She came into her first heat when she was twelve.

Those first few pangs of emptiness drove her deep into the desert, searching for something her soul already knew didn’t exist on her world. A strong, designated Alpha male.

A mate.

For days, she walked northward, through the Great Dunes, past the sinking sands and over the hardpan, until the bottoms wore out of her soft-skin boots, until the pain became so unbearable she could do nothing but curl up in the hollowed-out belly of a butte and weep while the wind whipped hot, scathing sand over her skin and through her hair.

She thought for sure she’d die alone.

But Plutt’s boys found her in the nick of time, half-dead and caked in filth made clinging and tacky from slick, her skin stained red-raw by the sand and glittering like fool’s gold from the mica in it. She spent almost a week laid up in his pawn shack after that, naked as a lugga-pup on a woven hemp mat, precious bacta-ointment smeared over her sunburns and the blisters on her feet while she gulped mouthfuls of mostly-clean water made thickly gritty by portion dust between long, wheezing naps.

 _“Got to get your strength up, girl,”_ Plutt boomed over her, aiming for paternal but missing by a meter for the ferocious greed in his beady black eyes. Like whenever he was about to swindle someone, he stood there rubbing his paws and smiling his rotted smile. _“That’s it, my girl. Drink up, drink up. Got to get you up to snuff!”_

When she could walk again, he sent her away from the outpost, to a hovel at the very edge of his territory on the eastern side. A ‘mega so close by would attract too much trouble, he said. Snatchers, mainly, and loads of ‘em, looking for a diamond in the salvage.

 _A diamond in the salvage._ Even now, the compliment stung her eyes.

It was the first one she ever got, from anybody.

She had to be very smart now that she’d presented, he said. A whole ‘mega was worth ten times a soiled one, he said. Though she never saw how she _wasn’t_ soiled, covered in red sparkling dust as she was. She hadn’t known then what _whole_ meant, only that she had to hide herself, like her master said. _‘_ til he found her just the right Alpha to take her off his hands. Then, she could start her new-new life.

Her perfect, dreamable life.

The AT hadn’t been so bad, really. Bit terrifying at first to be out there all alone, without another living soul to see or speak to. It was hard to fall asleep the first dozen nights or so. She woke up with more scorpions and tarantulas in her bed than she could count ‘til she managed to plug up all the cracks in the busted-out viewports. Even then, they’d be waiting for her on the door to the hull.

Still, she’d made it nice and homely, scratching pictures of suns and stars and friends into the walls with her hook-knife and making cozies out of scraps to prop up on the shelves. She chatted up all the scorpions and tarantulas she didn’t end up having to eat, and her shadow, and the moons that chased each other across the sky, while she waited for her Alpha to come.

Sometimes she liked to imagine him. What he’d look like. What he’d sound like. Would he be truthly? Would he be brave?

Would he like her at all?

She didn’t have much knowing about Alphas, or the Galaxy beyond her scraggly, sand-whipped corner for that matter. But she had a wild ‘magination, and on nights when she was too lonely even for a moon-chat to make her smile, she would sit on top of her AT-hut and talk to him. Her Alpha. She’d talk to him until the hurt in her heart went away.

Now, kneeling on the hard-woven carpet in the bedroom she shared with him in front of her wedding trunk, pink tulle skirt fanned out all around her, chest burning, eyes smarting with unshed tears, she can hardly, _hardly_ believe her life.

She is married to the Alpha of her dreams.

“Ahm’tage Brendol Hux,” she whispers, tracing the symbols on the chest that she knows are for his name because he told her so. When he gave it to her, on their wedding day.

 _To Rey of Jakku, from your loving husband, Armitage Brendol Hux,_ she can recite the inscription on the plate above the latch by heart, _We are no ordinary stars._

“ _Whee-beep-whirp_ ,” chirps her house droid beside her.

“I ain’t sad,” she assures it, touching away the tears on her cheeks and sniffling. She lays her head down smiling on the cool, sleek wood and wraps her arms round her trunk, whispering the ivory nylon of her little stockings as she wriggles closer to hug it with all her might. “I’m happy. I’m the happiest ‘mega in the all the Galaxy.”

_“Be-wheep-whoo.”_

“ ’xactly, Roomba. I have the best Alpha. He loves me more than credits, or jewels, or portions. He loves me more than _anything_. And we’re going to mate soon. Just as soon as I go into heat, we’re going to mate and make a baby,” she sighs happily into the warm, insistent sensation in her low belly that means her heat is about to come. “Just you wait.”

_“Bo-bo-beep-beep?”_

“Nah-uh!” she perks up, sitting back on her heels to chide the droid with a flap of her finger. Her diamond charm bracelet tinkles. “He didden say we can’t make a baby. Just that he’d _like_ not to. Says he don’t wanna share me with a baby yet,” she smooths her hand over her glossy little treble of buns and lilts her chin, “Chht, silly Alpha. He doesn’t know what he likes.”

Though she may not be as cleverable as he is, she _can_ count. And two lovies are better than one.

“We’ll show him, won’t we Roomba? You, me-” she cups her flat little tummy beneath the satin sash of her dress, “and Baby. He’ll be so happy. You’ll see,” her voice becomes softer, looking as if through the wall of their bedroom at the joy-filled scenes from their future, “I’ll make him so, so happy…”

_Then he’ll have to keep me. He’ll just have to._

The droid gives a dubious little shuffle, but doesn’t disagree.

Which is good. She’d hate to have to lock it in the water closet. Like her Alpha, she _does not_ _abide backchatter._

“Now,” her tiny hands grasp the lip of the lid. Her painted fingernails look pale and pretty against the dark wood. It’s a heavy, solid piece, planed from a tree the size of this very apartment, her Alpha tells her.

Which is insaneable. Nothing can be so large as her apartment.

Her Alpha is rich.

She hesitates before lifting it, chewing her lip a little as she thinks. Armitage has said over and over that this trunk and all the things in it belong to her. She can open it and take whatever she likes, whenever she likes.

But for some reason, it still feels not-quite-right. Like she’s taking something that’s his and not hers.

Her belly clenches.

_Heat is coming. Make a nest, so Alpha will want to mount-_

_Mmm, mount._

She shifts a little, then winces when it makes a stretching feeling deep inside her cunt. Her poor little cunny’s still sore from yesterday, when her Alpha took her in the bath. Her entrance stung this morning when she touched it, still slick like it normally is, but also raw. She hopes he comes back soon so he can rub bacta on it. She can do it herself, but it feels so much better when he does it, kneeling between her parted thighs with her panties around her ankles and her dress pulled up to her belly. Long, thick fingers moving like a soft apology through her body. Blowing cool breath on her hot flesh after coating her in the clear cream. His sharp, mean-looking features all gentle and contrite as he tells her how sorry he is, he didn’t mean to be so rough, she’s just too pretty and precious and perfect-

Her core clenches. A thick gush of hot slick makes her whimper and shift around again, rustling her silk stocks and pale pink skirt. Her toes curl. She wants to touch herself between her thighs.

 _Baby-baby,_ her pulse drums, _baby-baby nest-nest babybabynestbabynest-_

Driven, she forces up the lid of the trunk.

Inside is a universe of treasures.

Soft, long-haired fur throws with lush suede linings. Swaths of satin so slick and creamy they slip through her fingers like bacta. And miles and miles and miles of the softest steel-brushed Bantha wool in the Galaxy, in every gauge and pile imaginable, all a beautiful winter white.

She lifts a heavy bolt to her cheek and nuzzles. It feels like kitten-down, like the fluffiest bits of a feather. She is gushing, sex gulping out so much slick she’s slippery down to her knees, as she drags out more of the linings and holds them to her breasts like precious children. Her Alpha is so rich and so generous. _Such_ a good provider.

Their kits will never, ever starve.

“Oh Roomba,” she weeps into one of the furs, overcome with sparkling emotion. It too is white, as purely as the corona of light that halos the Jakkuvian sun.

She does not deserve this. She is not worthy of all this luxury. Of all his love.

But she is determined she will be, as she reaches still-hiccuping deep into the trunk and loads up her arms. She will build a nest so perfectable, so _correct,_ her Alpha will cry. He’ll rip off her dress and tear off his clothes and pin her down squealing and knot her so hard they’ll be stuck like that for a week. No, a month.

No, _forever_.

The door to his closet glides away smoothly into its pocket.

“Take all these to my cupboard,” she tells Roomba smartly. Her breath is trembling, but she’s all fire and purpose as she strains up on her tiptoes, her precious loot still swelling and trailing from her arms, and gropes her fingertips around the black velvet hangers until she can wrench down his starched shirts and uniform coats from their rod.

They land in a haphazard heap over RM-BA. It _whirp-whirps_ indignantly but does as it’s told, ferrying off her Alpha’s clothes to make way for the nest of the century.

She is going to get this right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_There._

What feels like weeks later, but is probably more like hours, she is finally, finally done.

She sets back on her stockinged heels, soaked through by now with her slick that dribbles freely from her hot, swollen folds, and admires her handiwork.

It’s _gorgeous_. Her Alpha will love it.

Just the thought of him in here with her, naked and pale and strong, pinning her with his teeth and with his paws while he mounts her harshly and tells her she’s a good, good girl, makes her belly flutter and her cunny clench and gulp. She’s peeled off her dress already, and her breast bindings, finding it hot inside the closet with the sliding door closed. Her little breasts are swollen and needy, aching for love, and without the bindings she can pause her work to fondle herself while she thinks about him.

_Alpha._

She kept her panties on, liking the way the lace rubs her when she works, crawling about the closet on her hands and knees, tucking and retucking her layers to get them just right. Her buns have come loose from their ribbons, she’s kept it back from her eyes with a single pink bow at her nape. Her charm bracelet tinkles, singing a pretty song, and her stockings she’s forgot about make a sweet sound on the bedding, a sort of gentle hush.

There’s only one thing wrong with her nest, and she can’t quite put her finger on it. She’s so ‘xausted from the work, dying of thirst but too tired to slide back the door and call out to RM-BA for a water glass. She’s panting, she realizes, as she lays flat on her back on top of the bedding, sinking into its feathered softness, worked up even further from the different sensations against her bare skin. Velvety furs and smooth silks and cottony wools.

She runs her fingers all over and through them, and then onto her breasts, tracing lightly around the edge of her crinkled areoles, imagining her Alpha’s cold blue eyes staring down at her as he gives her his teasing touch. Cupping herself, palms slick with the sweat that beads on the undersides of her breasts, and she wishes her hands were like his, broad and long-fingered and hard, as she kneads herself. The sensations make her shiver, especially when she pictures the way he looks into her eyes as he suckles her little rose bud nipples inside his hot, wet mouth, tongue gliding back and forth across their pebbled surface, making her come just from the feeling coupled with the soft slip of his big fingers through her slit.

Egged on by the images of her Alpha and the ache of her own tender touches, she glides her hands lower, following the ridges of her ribs down her little concave belly, tickling her own bellybutton the way he does before she strokes her slick-soaked mound. Just the ghost of her own touch makes her core clench and quiver.

“Ahm’tage,” she mews, wishing on all the stars inside the Galaxy that he was here with her now.

Her tongue tickles itself on the edge of her teeth inside her open, panting mouth as she slides her hand inside her panties.

The fragile lace bulges around her little knuckles, the scent of her own slick drenches the closet as she slips her fingertips through her slit.

_Oh, oh oh oh…_

She is _sopping,_ wetter than she’s ever been in her life, ‘cept for maybe her wedding night, when she thought she’d faint from the want of him to touch her, to mount her for the very first time. The slide of her fingertip through her folds is ‘lectric, and when she presses two trembling fingers together inside-

“Ahm’tage!” her whine is pitiful, bleating. The flesh around her entrance and inside is so sensitive and raw.

With the rolling sensation in her belly intensifying, she remembers the day they met.

She whimpers, staring unseeingly at the blue-hued bulb in the ceiling, her soft, staccato breath following the sluicing squelch of her fingers as that first glimpse of her pale savior paints the backs of her eyes.

Gaunt, angular features and hair on fire, so sleek and glossy it seemed to heliograph in the sunlight. He walks towards her, miles tall, a great black locus from her cricked angle beneath her speeder bike. Her fingers fuck faster as her Alpha crouches next to her in the sand. His black tactical uniform, made from polywoven fibers and molded plexiplastic, spans across his strong, lithe body like a night with no stars. _He is death,_ she remembers thinking, as her sore little cunt clenches demandingly around her fast-stroking fingers.

 _“Hello, little one,”_ he’d called her, in a voice that is so imperial, yet liquid-soft. Like the silky furs sliding under her skin.

His strange near-colorless eyes that matched the sky behind and all around him had searched her face through the shadow cast by her speeder along the sand. Time stopped, her heart, now slamming against her ribs as she chases her pleasure over the lonely badlands, had trembled as he reached out his hand. Three times larger than her own, wrapped in smooth, creaking leather. Pitch black. An abyss she wanted to hurl herself into and never look back. _“Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you. Are you lost, little dove?”_

“Uh-hugn…”

Her back bows within her nesting, her small fingers sloshing faster and faster through the hot, tender wet of her cunt as she loses all sense of time. She is back there on that lonely, hellish planet, tongue sealed to the roof of her mouth by the hopelessness and drought. Dying, she realizes, as all the tendons in her fragile feet strain upwards, as her heels dig and her thighs tense and shake. She was dying until the moment she put her hand inside of his.

She found the universe inside his arms.

Wrist aching, belly shaking, bones rising up through her body to live beyond her amongst the stars, she comes.

“Ahm’tage!”

She feels the hot slip of tears from the corners of her eyes down into her ears, the curl of her little painted toes inside their stockings, so long-drawn they crack and burn like logs on a roaring fire. The waist of her lace panties bites into her wrist and draws a tender line. Her cunt, already so used, knits around her fingers, milking her with its pulsating grip the way it would his cock.

The pale blue light above her suddenly feels frightening, as if it is the hateful leer of the Jakkuvian sun. She shies away from it, too weak from the aftershocks of her orgasm to do anything but drape her hand not held hostage over her eyes. “Ahm’tage-”

“My my my.”

She startles. Adrenaline pours through her like water from the mouth of an overturned jar, splashing down her spine and flooding tingling through her belly and in the tips of her toes. She shades her gaze with her hand and squints like she’s staring out across the sinking sands.

He is there, standing in the doorway of the closet. His body, wrapped up in his crisp dark formals, is tense, his nostrils flared, plush lips parted with a wet, rasping pant. His gloves are still on.

“What have we here?” he murmurs, braced against the frame to block any hope of escape. His voice, she realizes with a delectable thrill, is dangerously soft.

"Alpha," she coos back as him, hand still inside her panties. She's all flutters and desperate want.

_Mount mount mountmountmount-_

He tilts his head and sniffs the sex-drenched air of their nest. His chest swells, his thick, red tongue lashes across his chops. It leaves a gleaming trail across his teeth.

“Someone’s been a very naughty girl,” his cool, unblinking stare meet hers as he drawls.  There is something ‘tirely unfamiliar in his eyes that devour her body like a pair of jackals. Something fast-moving and fork-tongued.

_Alpha._

The solemn click of his belt buckle makes her jump. Her core clenches, thighs squeezing around her hand as she makes the most pitiful sound. His voice… that tender, sinister, murmuring voice…

“You know what I do to naughty kits. Don’t you, little dove.”

Just like that, she comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is absolutely my favorite Rey I've ever written. 
> 
> Oh Huxy. The Sith is missing, the Supreme Leader is devolving, the Galaxy is on fire - and you're fucking your omega in your closet.
> 
> Sir. Sir. *Sir.*


	7. Rain on my soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Huxtable's really not a bad guy. Rey has the emotional maturity of a snowpea. Heat is coming...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot help you, dear, if you don't read the tags.

Her orgasm soaks her in a warm rush of thick bliss. She floats, sensation sparkling in her belly and in her breasts and in the tips of her fingers and on the soles of her feet. She twinkles with the light of a billion stars.

“Ahm’tage,” she sighs, drawing her hand out of her little lace panties as she stares without blinking at her Alpha.

He is devastatingly unhandsome.

Tall and angular and cold. A short graft of stubble the same unusual color as his hair spans the lower half of his face from sideburn to sideburn, his palely lashes which sweep over his cool, lidded eyes have turned see-through under the blue-toned closet light. His big gloved hands are on his belt buckle, leading its path through the loops of his slacks. His eyes are on her cunny.

Shaking badly from her pleasure and from the want of him, she rolls onto her side and crawls to him on her hands and knees.

He licks his plush mouth, making his lips redder and wetter, and smiles. His eyes dance around her work.

“Did you make us a little nest, my angel?” his murmur is deep and sex-like. He sounds _pleased._

She stops at his feet with her knees tucked between the toes of his black-polished boots, stockinged thighs pressed together, small feet overlapping beneath her bottom. Heart flip-flapping inside her, she reaches up and clings to the waist of his slacks.

“Yes Alpha,” she nods, breathless. She’s eye-level now with the big bulge of his cock waiting inside his trousers. His musk and the salty scent of his pre-come make the room blur and her mouth water.

She feels like she’s spinning. Like she’s made of light.

“It’s beautiful,” his praise pours over her like warm bath water, making her whimper. His thick gloved fingers thread lovingly through her loose-bound hair to rub her scalp.

She _moans._

“You- you like it?” she pants, all outta breath as her lashes flutter above her worshipful stare. Her nipples are tight, needing his firm touch and hot, suckling mouth, the gusset of her panties is so soused it makes soft squelching sounds each times she rubs her thighs together.

Her Alpha smells so, _so_ right.

 _Thass what’s missing_ , she realizes from a distant place and time. His scent, all over her body and all over their nest.

She’s already picturing it, how glossy and slick his come will look dribbling down her bare breasts and soaking the silks and furs as he answers, “It is perfection, cherished. Very, _very_ well done.”

Her cunt gulps. She looks into his eyes.

“Absolute perfection,” he repeats, stroking her hair with his big leather hand. He isn’t staring at her work anymore, but at her quivering little body, drinking her up with those mean-blue eyes.

Panting, she closes hers and nuzzles deeply at his cock.

He groans.

His scent fills her, blending together all her thoughts like stars at hyperspeed, drawing them out into bright, indistinguishable streaks of white. She mouths his shape, tasting him through the fabric, enjoying the rough pattern his slacks make on her tongue.

“Such a good girl,” he murmurs. His thick black fingers wind through her crown and close into a fist.

Her scalp tingles. Moaning, she tilts her head to suckle the impression of him between her lips.

His hand drags her away.

She whimpers, a pathetic, pleading sound. He wrings her lightly to make her look at him, she pants open-mouthed up into his eyes and whines high in her throat.

“Take out my cock,” his voice is dangerously soft.

It makes her slick gush so much it squelches without her moving.

He groans and tells hers, “ _Now_.”

Her fingers tremble, she is so excited. She’s never wanted him more than in _this_ moment, which is insaneable. Because she wants him _all the time_.

She fumbles through his underclothes and catches her breath when her hand finds his hot, steely shaft. It slaps her cheek as it snaps rigid out of his slacks.

Its thick, mean veins stand out and pulse beneath the thin sheath of his foreskin, the flanged head is dark red and leaching come. Already, his knot is blooming just above its base. The thought of it swollen fat and trapped inside her cunny makes her glory in a full-bodied shudder.

He’s so big her fingers can’t even close ‘round him, he’s scalding-hot and hard as durasteel in her tiny hand. Greedily, she reaches back into his trouser for his sac.

He hisses and groans, “ _Good_ girl-”

It’s heavy, soft and malleable and throbbing, overflowing her hand.

She licks her lips and leans in to bury her face beneath his girth. His pre-come smears her, drenching her in the scent of his musk. His hot foreskin brands her lips, her forehead, her cheek, her nose. She squeezes him and groans at his hardness, the furious flex of his muscle in her hand, then nuzzles herself into the hot, humid slot between sac and knot.

Fuck, he’s so big and virile, so burnin’ hot. It makes her sore, abused little pussy clench and gulp, knowing _this_ is the man who mounts her.

_Alpha._

Eyes closed, she laps at him from root to tip.

He bucks and hisses, thrusts through the tight circle of her hand until his knot bumps her wrist, then withdraws. His gloved hands work the ends of her pink ribbon loose, he lifts and gathers her damp, silky hair and lets it fall back through his fingers, leather creaking as he whispers praises that make her whimper as she bathes his head with her tongue.

“Look at you, so sweet… so eager… that’s it, kiss Alpha’s cock-”

She does kiss him, prayerfully, with wet, closed-eyed presses of her open mouth. He feels plush and smooth on her lips, tastes like salt mixed with pheromones and musk. She leans in and slathers him head-to-knot in her spit and his pre-come she carries with her on her tongue, lips leading clear, trembling strands back to him each time she leaves his shaft. With her small grasp, she drags his shaft all over her face, washing in the wet stroke of soft foreskin and strength.

She wants to stay like this forever. Worshipping him on her knees between his feet.

Whimpering, she suckles his knot.

“Good girl,” his voice is a venomous rasp. She loves when he sounds like this, hoarse and fork-tongued and feral. Like he’ll eat her alive if she doesn’t do exactly what he says.

_Tell me, Alpha, tell me tell me_

His cool eyes burn as they stare down at her, intense and insaneable and adoring. “Touch your little cunny while you play with Alpha’s cock.”

_Yes! yes yes yesyesyesyes-_

Her pretty charm bracelet, another gift her Alpha has heaped on her, tinkles innocent inside their nest as her hand warbles down the sweat-slick curve of her belly to slip beneath the waistband of her panties.

Her lips leave his shaft in pure shock.

“I’m too wet,” she mews up at him, eyes slitting open in mildish distress. She is gushing, slick pooled in the sheer lace gusset seeping through to her thighs and the nesting underneath. She shifts her knees, and feels the furs and satin beneath her is soaked.

“Show me,” he breathes, lips peeled apart, eyes narrowed above her, hands wound in her hair. So in control of her.

_It’s okay, show Alpha. Alpha wants to see-_

She whimpers as her hand withdraws, then hesitates. Her heart flutters like a bird trapped under glass. She’s afraid to show him how drenched she is. What if it’s too much? What if she’s bad?

“Show me,” he repeats, even softer. His eyes glint like diamonds backlit by blue light.

Her belly contracts, pushing out another shameful rush of slick. She whines.

“It’s alright, little one,” he coaxes. His hand in her hair strokes her in a slow, soothing loop. “Show Alpha your pretty slick. There, that’s it. Just like that.”

Slowly, panting, she holds up her fingers and spreads them apart. Slick webs in long, glossy loops between them. It drips towards the lining of their nest and dribbles down her wrist.

His nostrils flare. Inside her hand still holding him, his cock jerks and pulses, knot swelling harder against her heel.

“Look at you, little girl. So wet for Alpha,” lightly, he wrings her hair. Sensation tingles along her scalp, making her lashes flicker and her nipples ache, wanting to be touched.

“Put it on my cock,” he tells her.

Her bracelet tinkles again as she takes as much as she can of his shaft in her shaking, slick-coated grasp and pumps him in stuttering strokes. Like the way her sweet-smelling perfume winds with the sharp bite of his cologne whenever they roll around together in the sheets, their scents mingle, making her mouth water and her eyes well up.

“Suck,” he says from above.

She licks her lips, red and plump from loving on him, and opens wide.

The hot stretch of skin as he presses himself inside her is heaven.

_Heaven._

“Rey,” he moans low.

_Love Alpha please Alpha make Alpha feel good-_

She hollows her cheeks and bobs.

She’s only able to take in a third of him, he is so, so thick, so long, and her mouth is so small. She makes up for it by stroking and pumping his shaft with her little hands, made simple by her spit and her own sweet-smelling slick. Her eyes fall shut, she concentrates on that beautiful, solid feeling of hard veins and fat, flanged head dragging against her tongue

_Alpha._

She twists and dips, rises and dives back in, dissolving into a trance as she finds her rhythm. Her jaw is already sore, split so wide-open. But he feels so good, tastes so good, _sounds_ _so good_ , snarling and chuffing through his teeth at her “faster” and “suck harder” and “take more”.

 _Alpha,_ her blood sings, _AlphaAlphaAlphaAlpha-_

Her breasts rise and fall with her fast, nasal-breathing, her thighs scissor each other to rub her aching little pussy with lace. Just one time, she wishes her Alpha would wring her hair and slam himself down her throat. Just to feel him all the way down to her heart.

His hand jerks suddenly in her hair. From far away, over the lush, lewd sounds of her slurp, his snarl floats back to her, “- said _look at me_ , girl.”

She opens her eyes. Spit and pre-come leak down her wrists and forearms and wet her belly and breasts.

His eyes are boring down into her. Their irises are the most violent, electric blue she’s ever seen as he wrings her in his fist. “Yes, that’s it. Good bitch. Look at Alpha when you suck my cock.”

Her belly tightens and tremors. She moans around him.

It’s like he’s read her heart as he bares his teeth and starts to drags her all the way down to his knot.

“Choke,” he commands.

Yeah, she absolutely does.

Her tummy hollows, her lungs squeeze. Her throat flutters helplessly around him as he rocks inside her tight case, hissing and groaning and throbbing in her mouth. Tears slip from the corners of her eyes and streak down her burning cheeks. She definitely can’t breathe.

But she doesn’t struggle, she keeps staring up into those blueful eyes.

Because she trusts him. Completely.

_Ahm’tage._

“ _Yes_ ,” he rasps. His leather fist draws her back up his shaft, until the flared head of his cock pops with a lush, rude slurp out of her mouth, followed right behind by a fast rush of spit that strands back to his tip and falls in thick gleaming ropes to her chest. She coughs and swallows.

“My darling girl,” he pants savagely, eyes unblinking through the stranded mess of fire-colored hair hanging over them. With fierce tenderness, he pulls her hair to tip up her chin and leans down to kiss her mouth.

It’s sloppy, sensual and wet. Beautiful and pure. His soft stubble tickles her as his tongue searches mercilessly inside her, so much smoother and smaller than his big, mean cock. She squeezes his shaft and suckles him to soothe herself, thankful for the break. Her throat aches. Her lips feel stretched and numb.

“God, you’re so perfect,” he tells her, as soon as they peel apart, “so _fucking_ perfect.”

She flushes at his praise.

Without preamble, he strokes two black-gloved fingers inside her open, panting mouth. “Ah-ah, don’t suck. Hold it open. Good bitch, yes, just like that. Let me fuck your mouth.”

Her eyes glaze. She shudders and swallows, tasting cock and leather, feeling his fingers slide everywhere as her throat struggles to bob.

Finally, he folds over her, mouth open, tongue out and glistening, and withdraws his fingers until just their tips curl lightly over her bottom teeth. Spit, thin and twisting, glinting like a crystal strand in the blue-toned light, trails from the tip of his tongue to touch hers.

Her lashes flutter, her cunt clenches so violently she whimpers.

_Alpha-_

“So good,” he praises softly, unbelievingly. His chest heaves with vicious pride. He is looking at her like she’s the only girl in the Galaxy.

Like she’s his whole world.

He smears his fingers over her face, painting her chin and her cheeks in their spit, then bends down and takes her ribcage between his hands.

He kisses her deeply as he lifts her from their nest.

His cock slips from her grip, she whines high in her throat until she realizes he’s raising her _up_ , up off the floor. Their lips pull apart with a soft, wet _smooch_ as he lifts her above him and holds her there, little stockinged feet dangling, body limp as a precious cloth doll’s.

She holds his shoulders and basks in his attention as his eyes lap up every detail. He is still fully dressed in his dark formal uniform, his cock juts like a threat from his slacks. He seems to soak up all the space inside their small nest as he admires her. Her small, glistening breasts and trembling belly, she slick-soaked thighs. The pale lace molded to the delicate lips of her sex.

“You are _exquisite,_ ” he snarls in a voice she’s never heard before, for how much raw, feral affection swims inside it. Like a black shadow moving under the surface of sinister waters.

She wants him to lunge up and snatch her in his jaws.

Like he can read her mind again, he lowers her to kiss her lashes, her lips, the tip of her nose. He lavishes her in hot, open-mouthed kisses, then brings her into his chest. Her feet still do not touch the floor.

On pure instinct, her thighs scrabble up around his hips and her stockinged ankles stack behind him in time with his kneel.

Soft white layers of satin and wool and fur swallow her up as he bears her back into their nest. She clings to his neck as they kiss, over and over, his gloved hands slipping all over her bright, young body as her hands bury in his harsh, glowing hair. She yips and squeals and whimpers, frenzied by his love, bathing his face in fast flicks of her small pink tongue.

_Alpha. I love you, Alpha-_

A sound finds her through the drum of her heartbeat, dark and smoky. Rhythmic and deep. Her cunt clenches so hard her walls touch.

He’s purring for her again.

Like a drug, his deep, oceanic rumble drowns her in peace, dragging her out into gentle knowing-

_Alpha is pleased._

She mewls inside his mouth.

His hands find her thighs where they cycle softly at his waist, he strokes and squeezes her, trails down the nylon of her stockings to her feet and gropes her ass.

Together, they undress him, rolling around inside their soft nesting, parting kisses only when they have to, staying molded to each other’s bodies until finally, he’s naked. The heat of his skin, his dark masculine scent and the rumble of his purr surrounding her, his strong body flexing all over and beneath and alongside her, is beauty.

He, is beauty.

_Alpha._

His fingers free from his leather gloves glide her sopping lace down her legs.

Trembling, she parts her thighs.

“Oh, my angel,” his murmur tingles her belly and along her spine. He stares greedily at her sex, thumbs apart her pink, swollen lips, groans at her rushing, dribbling slick.

“I’m too sore,” she pouts softly, lashes fluttering, as he fingers her seam.

“So you should be,” he smirks without sympathy. He presses three inside.

She stares up into his eyes where he is leaning on his forearm above her, bellies kissing, fingers buried to the root. Her cunny milks him as she mewls and struggles lightly. He lines up their hips and lifts her leg to drape over the small of his back.

Both of them are shaking.

“Please,” pretty tears drip like diamond specks down her cheeks. Her little insides already ache so much, but she can’t, _can’t_ breathe with him outside her.

“Do you know-” he starts, tracing every feature of her young, beautiful face before his breath snares completely. His lip tremors, parted from its other. His hair hangs down in his eyes. “Do you know, little girl, how _much_ I love you?”

“You can’t,” she shakes her head, determined to see him through her tears that spectrum in the light, “you can’t love me more than I love you.”

“Oh my sweet girl-” he hangs his head, and pushes inside her.

She arches, desperate to take him to the knot.

She’s still so tender from the last time he took her, and every time before, her walls saturated in an ache that never really goes away. But this, the hot, splitting stretch of his shaft rearranging her, the rake of his veins across her innocent flesh – _this_ is what she lives for. What gives her life.

“I love you,” she breathes out on every exhale, arms clutched around him, bodies slip-sliding against each other as he strokes long and deep and slow. His face is buried in her neck, her words wash over his back like baptism.

She makes him new again. Whole.

“I love you, I love you, I love you, Ahm’tage-”

His arms cinch under and around her, binding her to him with his strength as he pistons his hips harder, faster, his knot beating at her entrance, begging to be let in. Her body vibrates with his purrs, his hot, ragged pant souses her ear.

He glides smoothly through her slick that slathers them both from knees to belly. His soft, heavy sac slaps lewdly at her ass.

“Oh God,” he gasps.

“I wan- wanna baby,” she stutters breathless, tears slipping from the corners of her eyes and running down her temples. They pool in her hair and in the shell of her ears. Her heart is beating beyond her body, somewhere among the stars. “Ahm’tage please- _please_ \- I wanna baby-”

His glutes flex, he rounds his back and thrusts into her deeper than he ever has before.

“You want my baby?” he huffs in her ear, panting and gasping and snarling and _smug_. He rolls his hips, digging at her womb, then withdraws and holds with just his head still inside.

Pleasure winds her center, tightening the muscles in her tummy and in her legs and narrowing her senses to just this. Just him, wrapped around her body. Inside her. Liquid and hot.

She nods, eyes pinched. Body clutching him everywhere, inside and out.

Desperate.

“Yeah-”

“Say it again,” he slams home, a stroke so hard, so deep, it echoes in her shoulders. He lifts his head but keeps their bodies molded together, fucking her with just the piston of his hips and the flex of his lower back.

She cups his face between her juddering hands, stubble rasping at her palms, and looks panting into his eyes. “I want your baby, Ahm’tage- Ahm’tage, I want your baby inside me- uhn-”

He shudders through a low, tortured groan as he fucks her harder, faster. _Wild._

His short, stuttering gasps bath her face in his breath. “My sweet… little girl… wants my baby?”

“Yes,” she bleats, trembling now as her orgasm riots up through the dark to meet her. She has, has, _has_ to come. “Give it to me, Ahm’tage-”

“My darling,” he pants, mouth straining open, lips peeling back over his teeth.

 _Mark._ He’s going to mark her.

Her mating gland burns in her back, her whole body tenses with anticipation as his knot slams home, tearing her open and swelling to lock.

He bites the gland in her neck.

It has the same effect as his teeth in her mating mark, making her keen long and high and clamp down as she comes, light bursting through her, tingling and bright in her belly and in her cunt. Her spine stacks, she opens her mouth and closes her eyes and convulses as his cock pumps her full of hot, fertile come.

He comes and comes and comes more.

It fills her, making her small womb stretch and swell. Her eyes roll back, she lets her knees fall open amongst the sea of nesting as pleasure so pure foams and sparkles through her whole body. She even feels it at the roots of her hair.

Dimly, she can sense her Alpha pumping. Short, hard thrusts accompanied by a bursting rope of hot come and his deep-throated groans. His tongue laves her neck - when she shudders, he presses deeper to hold her hostage by his hips and his cock anchored against her womb.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he rumbles darkly.

Beaming shut-eyed at the ceiling, she makes angel-wings in the soft nest with her arms until she falls asleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of closet door rolling away startles her awake.

“Shh-shh,” her long, pale Alpha draped on top of her draws his arm back from the door and strokes her hair from her eyes, “it’s alright. I’m only calling for RM to order dinner. That’s all.”

“I donn want dinner,” she pouts, trying to remember where she put her arms and legs. They seem to be heavy and far away from her. They won’t come when she calls. “I wanna mount.”

He snorts into her neck. “You just had a mount, Misses Hux.”

With a roll of his hips, he shows her his cock still hard as bedrock inside her, locked deep in her little cunt by his fat knot. The ache makes her huff and moan.

“A thorough one, I might add.”

Cool air from their bedroom seeps through the cracked closet door, displacing some of their scent and pheromones, making her able to breathe again.

They reek of sex.

“Yes, Alpha,” she mews, trying her best not to squeeze his hard, corded length stretching her walls apart. If she does, it will swell and spit another rope of scalding come into her belly. Already, her tummy’s swollen, taut and aching from being too full.

“Good girl,” he murmurs into her ear, dark and sleek like a Jakkuvian scorpion. His lips draw her gland between them and suckle. His stubble tickles her cheek.

She clenches anyway, and whimpers pitifully at another stinging jet.

“Yes, that’s it,” he whispers, big hands sliding sensually down her sidebody to soothe her, “Milk my cock.”

Her breath snags. She tips her head back and whines out as another baby orgasm scatters sparkling sensation like a sigh. The tighter she wrings him, the more come she draws.

He huffs through a smirk against her neck, “Do you still want my baby, little kit?”

_Baby! Baby-baby-beeb-babe-lil’ baby buntin’-_

She coils her arms around him and digs her fingers into his hair.

“Yes!” she sings all breathless as suddenly the tightness in her tummy becomes the most beautiful thing she’s ever felt. “Yes yes yes! _Please_ , Ahm’tage-”

Groaning, he lifts up his head to give her more hot-mouth kisses as he rocks his hips.

His knot tugs at her entrance, threatening to tear her apart if she tries to run off. She can’t think of a better place then here, trapped under her Alpha’s big pale body, caught tight on his love.

A sound outside the closet makes him break his kiss and snarl. Instinctively, she wriggles deeper into his shadow under the protective cage of his arms.

 _“Wheeeeep!”_ their housedroid chirps.

“Ah, RM,” her Alpha looks sheepish as his lips slip back down over his teeth. “My apologies-”

He says it with a hint of amusement, because he knows she’ll give him a smack if he doesn’t. “Please bring a meal for Misses Hux and myself to share. Something light, _fresh_ ,” he emphasizes, “and plenty of water.”

“Wiff ice!” she pipes, threading her hand under her Alpha’s arm to wave to her friend.

It beeps and does a little bow like she taught it to before it revolves and rolls off.

“Thanks!” she calls after it.

Where he’s braced above her on his hands, hips still holding hers, her Alpha gives her his skeleton-smile. “You know, for such a naughty little kit, you can be very polite to that drone.”

Her eyes widen, she remembers suddenly how he found her in the first place - touching herself in their nest.

She gulps.

The law is she’s not ‘llowed to play with herself unless he’s watching. Which isn’t fair, really. When he’s gone is when she needs to touch herself the most.

She tries to make herself soft and harmless beneath him, hands curling under her chin and big doll-eyes wary as she asks, “Are you gonna punish me?”

Ooo, she hates punishments. They’re humiliating and stupid and she hate hate _hates_ them.

Last week, after she tried climbing into the cabinets for chocolate biscuits and fell down, he gave her a scolding that made her eyes sting and her lip quiver and then made her write lines. _I will not climb the furniture,_ ten whole times. Took her all day, since she’s still learning her letters. But boy she can spell furniture, now. Forwards and back.

The whoopin’s, though, those are absolutely the worst.

Ass naked and hiked up over his knee, arms dangling down the other side. Scolding her as he _smack-smack-smacks_ , not caring if she cries. He hasn’t it done it to her often, only when she does something _really_ bad. Dangerous, or totally disrespectable. It feels awful and her bum aches for hours after it’s done.

He won’t give her one for just touching herself though, would he?

He’s smiling, so she doesn’t think so. Her Alpha never smiles when he punishes her.

He says it makes him sad.

“My dear,” he thumbs the beginning of a reptile-tear from the corner of her eye, “if I punished you for every time you snuck a treat while I’m away, you would be writing lines for the rest of your life.”

 Something in his smirk and orderly tone makes her gush around his cock, even as she flushes indignably. “Wha- I- who ratted me! Was it Roomba? Ooo, that traitor! I’ll rip his lil’ guts out and sell ‘im for parts-”

Her Alpha laughs.

It’s a deep, harsh sound, sort of like barking, and very rare in the beginning when he first brought her home. He tells her he never laughed before she came. Or if he had, he couldn’t remember when.

“I’m sorry,” she tries, acting shy-like. She pets his shoulders, trails her fingers down his arms. “You’re gone so long in the day, and my pussy misses you.”

He lets out a short, startled snort as a blush ruddies his gaunt, angular face. “You, young lady, have the mouth of a soldier.”

“Thass what you call it!” she crows accusingly, squirming on his knot. It tugs and she whimpers and settles down without being told to.

He lays his forehead on hers and pecks soothing kisses to her mouth. “I see. So it’s pussy’s fault, is it?”

“Yes,” she nods firmly, then rubs their noses together. “She’s very greedful.”

“Oh yes,” his eyes are twinkling, “I do not know what can be done about that…”

“Lick her more, maybe?” she supposes innocently as she toys with a lock of hair curling damp near his ear.

He purses his lips, then loses the battle with another woofing laugh.

Her heart feels a thousand times light as Roomba returns with dinner.

They feed each other by hand, something that felt awkward to her when she first tried it. In her short life she’d learned never to stick her fingers so close to something’s mouth. Now she adores it, the feeling of his lips as he nibbles up a bite. How peaceful he looks, smug and soft-smiling, gold lashes halfway down his eyes.

She sits up on his lap with his cock so deep it feels like a part of her own body, tucked up under her ribs, guarding her heart. Plate on his chest, she feeds him morsels of cheese and fruit and sponge cake dipped in orangey honey, using her kisses as his napkin and petting his hair between bites. He tells her he feels like a sultan as his thumb not tucked behind his head chases the underside of her breast. He treasures the ends of her hair between his fingers and tells her she’s the most beautiful girl in the Galaxy.

“Yes, but the _nest_ ,” she fishes, knees notched next to his hips, feet tucked under his thighs to keep her toes warm.

“Why, it’s excellent, simply remarkable. Didn’t I say so?” he leans up a little, muscles in his stomach flexing meanly and making her cunny gulp, and looks around the closet. “It is a marvel of economy. You’ve been efficient without sacrificing function or comfort. It’s really quite a clever use of the space.”

 _Clever._ He thinks she’s clever.

Her eyes well up.

“- such a discerning eye for texture. I am no nest-expert, granted. But I must say this one is _very_ fine,” his knuckles brush her cheek as his cool, clearful eyes trace her face. “Very fine, indeed…”

Suddenly, he looks so sad.

“Ahm’tage?” she cocks her head, moves the plate so that she can hold his heart in her hands, “Whass wrong?”

He hesitates, closing his eyes into a long sigh.

“It is a perfect place, to make our own. Only,” he looks at her, “I’m not sure I shall be able to share it with you, my love. Oh that I could.”

Her heart completely stops.

“What you mean? Why? Why shall you not be sure?”

His eyes still look sad. But also resolved. “My darling. I have to go away.”

“What?” her chest hurts. It’s cold and tight as all the warm, happy feeling floats away like nightsmoke above a burned-out flame. “Go ‘way? You can’t. Why? No, no-”

She shakes her head at his chest, presses her hands into him until she can feel his heartbeat. Ever-steady. Solidable and real.

It _belongs_ to her. He can’t leave her, he _can’t_.

“I must,” he’s trying to sit up, to touch her, but she shirks him, squirming and batting him away. His knot tugs warningly at the tight ring of muscle around her entrance, “Circumstances have escalated beyond our control. My love, I am so sorry-”

“No! _No_ , you-” she fights his hands trying to grab hold of her wrists, wincing and gritting her teeth each time his plug pulls sharply at her opening. Her heart takes off in panicked flight.

_Alpha’s leaving doesn’t want doesn’t love hates you stupid bad girl bad-_

“Rey, stop, stop this-” he’s suddenly desperate to catch her by her arm, her waist, any part of her he can reach, “I know you’re upset, I understand that and I cannot blame you- but you are going to hurt yourself, Rey-”

“ _When_ ,” she screeches, tear-blind, slapping and kicking hard as she can. She wants him out of her, out outoutout-

“I don’t know, Rey please _stop-”_

Her entrance feels just like her heart.

Tearing.

_Bad Alpha ‘bandoned us all lone nobody wants the girl-_

“Get off me!” she screams, “I _hate_ you-”

“Rey, no-”

_Run away before he hurts you run away runrunrun-_

Like being split open at the seams, she scrambles and wrenches and rips off his knot.

The pain is endless, spreading and burning-hot. It makes her sight go dark and her horizon tilt sideways, it makes her brain slosh around in her skull and the floor seesaw beneath her feet as, faster than he can catch her, she scrabbles up from their nest overturning their plate and sprint-stumbles out the closet door.

Her Alpha is right behind her.

 _Too late,_ her naked, shattered heart caws as she beats him over the threshold of the ‘fresher and slams the panel to shut the pneumatic door in his face. She hits the lock-switch with juddering fingers and backs away holding herself around her middle and sobbing as he pounds.

“Rey, you’re _hurt_. Open this door!”

“Go ‘way!” she screams with all her heart. Her breath hitches in violent stops and starts, she knows dimly she’s going into shock as she shuffles back, shaking.

There’s a long dashed line on the tile leading back to the door her Alpha is thrashing against.

_Blood._

She sends a trembling hand between her thighs and comes back with-

_Blood._

“Rey!” her Alpha is roaring from a thousand lightyears away, “Rey, I will break down this door! God _damnit-”_

The floor tilts, rising kindly up to meet her as her Alpha rips the whole frame right out of the wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. Well well well. This is not good.
> 
> Let me know if you're having a good time : )


	8. Love and marriage/love and marriage/it's an institute you can't disparage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heartbreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The feeling you get in your chest when you see *the* Ms. GreyWarrior has bookmarked your Rux fic. 
> 
> *kisses fingers* 
> 
> In my own heart, I have arrived.
> 
> Also - *claps pompoms* 
> 
> Ready, guys? Okay! Gimme an R - gimme an E - gimme an A - gimme a D! *rolls pompoms* Reeeeeeeeeeeead the tags!
> 
> *jump kicks* Yay!

_Four months ago…_

 

 

He woke to the rustle of bedsheets and the creep of a fragile hand.

A glance at the chronometer above the mantle confirmed his suspicion. O’two hundred hours.

His little one was out of bed.

For the fourth time.

“Shh, quiet you,” she scolded sharply, below her breath.

Out in the darkness of the living room, a solitary red light of his house drone's infra-scanner blinked twice, followed by an indignant _whirp!_ and then a _whir-hum_ as it revolved itself and roved away toward its docking station in the kitchen.

“I said quiet,” she hissed after it, pawing for purchase at the sofa-edge made slippery by bedsheets. Her bony knee dug into his rib, “stupid tattle-bot _…”_

“Young lady,” his murmur was sudden, roughhewn from stunted sleep. And tacitly amused. “May I ask, why you are not in bed?”

A pause in her clumsy rustling. She was crouched over him, one knee wedged in his side, the other halted mid-arc over his body. Her little hands were compressing his chest.

“Alpha?” she whispered. Her shape was made visible to him by the lamp from the master bedroom left on, pouring light into the hallway in a warm, slanted shaft and lightening her profile against the living room shadows. It illuminated the backs of her eyes, making them flash like a cat’s in the darkness. One of her little shoulders and both her small rose-tipped breasts glowed directly above him, like a golden statue in a night garden touched by moonlight.

The scent of her glands and of her slick soaked the air.

His mouth watered. His heart sprang into a furious race, pounding the hardpan to close the distance between them as his hands took her tiny, smooth waist and settled her back into his lap.

“Presumably,” he replied.

It had been two days since his mission in the Jakkuvian System on the Outer Rim, where he found this little unmated kit injured and cowering beneath her speederbike, her delicate skin blistered by sunburn and caked in red sand, hiding from the thieves who had stolen her salvage and broken her hand. He’d crouched down in the dust and coaxed her patiently out of hiding with tender words and soft clicks of his tongue. A timid thing, she’d stayed as far out of his reach as she could while he set and bound her hand.

In the end it was a nutripack and a canteen of cool, clear water that won her over, rather than his gentle reassurances. Soon she was up and bounding about, yipping and chirping and tugging the sleeve of his field uniform as she chattered, _“I never met an officer before- can you arrest people - do you have a blaster- can I shoot it- whass your family like?”_

 _Rey_. A pretty name for a beautiful, effervescent child. He felt he loved her even then.

For two days, she led him by hand through the harsh badlands to Niima outpost and to her slaver, Unkar Plutt, from whom he could obtain the droid he was searching for. Skipping and leaping and hopscotching, wearing herself out so that he had to carry her hitched on his back to reach his goal in time. Her slight arm stretching over his shoulder, pointing with her finger as she called out the sights she knew by heart. _“Thass a medium rock. Thass a big one. That one’s their baby-”_

By the end of their short journey, the General had found himself quite unable to part with her. So Plutt parted with his head instead.

Which is how Armitage Brendol Hux, bastard heir to Lord Brendol Albrecht Hux and General of the highest order to the greatest military machine in the history of the Galaxy, found himself kneeling amongst the filthy black-scorched rubble, hot, rank sweat generated by the inexorable sun and the blaze he’d unleashed upon Niima menacing his person beneath the unforgiving polyweave of his uniform, offering himself ardently to a no-name sand urchin who could hardly be in her sixth year of cores. An _omega,_ of all creatures.

It was foolish, laughable. _Mad._

As was the way he hoisted her above him and spun, grinning like a sun-bleached skull with his copper hair burning like the world around then, when she accepted him with an emphatic, shrill, _“Yes! Yes yes yesyesyes!”_

He’d had to double his doses of anti-serum, of course, once they returned to the _Supremacy_. Despite the aggressive amounts he took every quarter to suppress his nature ever since it had emerged, his _other_ was absolutely bellicose, struggling up through his cells and straining at his skin to meet her.

 _The Alpha_.

It had scented her from ten clicks across the windless desert. It had wanted her from the moment her large, frightened eyes first peered up at him from the dry shade of her bike. Like a malignant shadow rising against a shroud of smoke in a fire-fight, it was surfacing to claim her.

A catastrophe he would not abide.

Hence why he was bedded down on the narrow leather sofa amidst a sea of stagnant shapes that was his darkened living room. It took seventy-two hours for the serum to cycle fully through his system, until then the urge to take her on her knees with her cheek crushed against the carpet until she caught squealing and sobbing on his knot raged against his self-control.

He believed he’d been quite clever, setting the date of their nuptials for a week from his dosing, giving his instincts time to settle, to adjust to the sweet, drugging undertow that was the ever-present scent of her glands and her pussy. A chance for them to acquaint themselves with one another, for him to woo her, court her, as he should. However much a sham his efforts were.

By law, she could not refuse him. She could be put to death for merely sneering in his direction.

A fact of which she seemed wholly unaware, sitting astride his raging erection, palms planted in his chest, bare as the day she was born. She was  _infatuated_ with him.

“Ahm’tage,” she chided, still whispering and a bit breathless. She was like that when they were together in intimate moments. Anxious and eager, brash yet shy. Relentlessly alluring. “You’re ‘posed to be sleeping.”

He snorted, resisting the urge to stroke her hair draping down to his chest back over her shoulder as he reminded her mildly, “It is you who should be asleep, little dove. It’s well past your bedtime.

“I was sleepin’,” she argued. Her voice rose, a tiny, pretty warble that reminded him of songbirds in gilt cages. His cock ached to correct her tone. “I missed you in my sleep.”

Where there ever sweeter words?

“Ah, I see,” unbidden, his hand stroked the rounded slope of her slender shoulder. Her skin made a hushed, intimate sound beneath his palm. She was warm, smooth. Soft. 

Though recuperated from her rest in the healing chamber, her body was still painfully thin. He relished the thought of feeding her, watching her grow full then plump with his kits. Already he’d sat her in his lap like a doll and fed her from his fork and from his fingers, every delectable treat he could think of, that was available to them on the ship, savoring how openly she reveled in his care and his attention. How she basked in his love.

Could he love her, truly, this kitling he’d known only a few days’ time?

 _Yes_ , he thought, as she pedaled and squirmed her way beneath his borrowed bedsheet, huffing as she went. _Absolutely, yes._

“Are you hungry, my angel? Can I tempt you to eat?”

“Eat?” he could _hear_ the puzzled wrinkling of her nose as she stretched herself out along his body, feet twining with his calves, propped like a sphinx on her elbows, hands holding his heart. “It’s not breffast time. Silly Alpha-”

She pressed up and pecked a wet, artless kiss to his mouth. Her eyes shone, large and unknowing, looking sensually into his own as an instinct older than time drove her to scissor her thighs, stimulating friction for her needy little cunt.

“I wanna mount,” she whispered, breathless. Bold without knowing for what she asked.

“I know, sweet one. I know,” he soothed quietly. His heart thrashed, his other threw back its maw and howled at the stars.

He brushed back her hair. “But I cannot take you tonight-”

He laid his finger over her lips as she drew a protesting breath. “It is not time.”

“ _When_?” she pleaded. Her tiny hands fisted in his sleep shirt and tugged. “When can you take me, Ahm’tage, _when?_ ”

His heart ravened, he felt it beat under every inch of his skin.

He thought of the Sith, the only other Alpha male aboard the _Supremacy,_ waltzing besottedly with his exotic-looking omega, staring smirking down at her by his side whenever she spoke, kissing her openly in corridors and meeting rooms and taking her in every half-dark alcove during night-cycle while they were out for their walks.

Oh how he had curled his lip at such disgraceful, undisciplined behavior. How he had _judged._

Now, he could only pray that would be the limit of his own foolishness. That he would not chase this girl naked through the hallways and bend her over the altar on their wedding day as she shrilled and mewled her vows.

God help him, he was _saturated_ in the want of her. _Bewitched._

“Soon, my love,” he promised her, as the tips of his fingers traced light tattoos into the warm skin of her back. She was smooth and supple. Ready to be tried. Through his underclothes and course, utilitarian sleep pants, his cock strained to reach her.

_No, Armitage. No._

With his hand not stroking her, he took one of hers from his chest.

Gently, he folded down her thumb and forefinger to show her, “Three more days.”

Her lip trembled. He thumbed at her quivering as she wriggled and whined quietly, “That’s too many. Ahm’tage, it _hurts_ -”

“Shh, there now,” his hand tracing her back trailed lower, over the crest of one small, pert rump cheek, into the cleft of her sex. She was slick to her mid thighs, dribbling from her squeezing entrance.

Poor little thing.

With his hand not touching her sex, he guided her down to his chest.

“Lie down, angel,” he whispered, pressing a kiss into her hair as the tips of his fingers slipped deftly through her small folds. “Lie down and close your tired eyes. Alpha will make the ache go away.”

“Alpha,” she whimpered. Her arms encircled his chest, wormed beneath him. Her hands linked together behind his back, between his shoulder blades. She tipped her chin and nuzzled deep into the crook of his neck, drinking in his scent.

His need throbbed, painting a thousand dark desires against of the backs of his eyes. He ignored them all, narrowing his thoughts to only this – the slip of his fingers against her hot, slick flesh and her breath upon his neck, shallow and ragged and unsure.

“Alpha,” she mewed pitifully when his fingertip found the tiny dip in her clit. She shifted, and panted, and shuddered.

“Shh-shh-shh, lie still, little one. Let Alpha touch you. There, that’s it. Such a sweet little girl.”

His blood rushed and rang out like the _shing_ of a blade. But he would not have her before she was ready. Before he had given her his love and his name.

He would never harm her, his Rey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_Now._

 

 

 

The regeneration room is aggressively cold.

Like an annulus of columns fortifying the curving, stark-paneled walls, upright chambers spaced equidistance apart form a continuum around the room.

He prowls their perimeter, stopping briefly with every pass before the only occupied cradle. He cannot look in too long. When he does, he wants to beat himself against the glass until he breaks.

Hooked up to breathing tubes and monitoring cables, his wife is unbearably small.

Doctor Branson had tried to convince him a regeneration chamber was wholly unnecessary, that while the bleeding may be profuse, the tear was in fact quite small and simple to repair. But the General, standing inside the doorway of the infirmary with his wife fainted in his arms, blood mixed with her slick and his semen from between her legs soaking through the bedsheet he wound hastily, shaking, around her after lifting her off the bathroom floor, had insisted in such a way the good doctor did not dare refuse him.

That he had made the journey from his private quarters to the sick bay blood-smeared and stark-raving naked only lent credence to his savage desperation. Partial to life, Branson did not refuse him as the General bore his girl to the healing chambers. Though even self-preservation could not keep the doctor from exclaiming as the sheet was unraveled, _“God man, what have you done?”_

 _What, indeed,_ he thinks with wry loathing as, alone inside the room, he makes another silent pass.

The scrubs the doctor lent him are of an irritating fabric, thin yet coarse, too short for his legs. His feet are bare, his hair a wild, tangled crop of fire. Strands hang in his eyes cast down at the floor.

One day he’s been off the anti-serum.

One day.

One.

And he’s nearly killed his wife.

His chest burns, self-hatred a living, churning, bone-burning engine where his heart should have been. His hands shake. He cannot breathe for fear of bursting into weeping.

He should never have kept her.

Such a fragile, tender creature, needing gentle nurturing. Patient, soft-handed care. And he, a monster, and a fool, for dreaming he could be anything more than a beast.

He pictures her face as she tore herself off his knot before he could catch her, hears her heart-rending scream, sees her lying on the refresher floor. He wants to hit himself until he bleeds, he wants to rip the healing chambers one-by-one off the wall. He wants to tear down the Galaxy. To swallow all the stars.

His jaw ticks. Behind his back, his clasped hands clench so hard his knuckles crack.

_Pace pace pace_

The hiss of the pneumatic doors raises his hackles. He turns and bares his clenched teeth at Doctor Branson stepping through with his hands already up in a show of submission, clip-chart in one of them, eyes purposely averted towards the floor.

“May I come in, General?”

The General draws back, shame burning through him. He does not recognize what he’s become.

“Forgive me, Doctor,” he gestures, “Please.”

For a while, Branson says nothing. He stands at what he judges is a respectful distance from Lady Hux’s chamber and passes his clip-chart discreetly from hand to hand. Several times he takes a breath and lifts his eyes as if to speak, then demurs wincingly.

“Out with it, man,” the General snaps.

Tentatively, the doctor begins, “Her vital signs are all perfectly normal, and her lacerations have healed seamlessly, as I knew they would. However-” he hesitates, “the… extent of the tissue damage within her-  the compounded trauma, as it were, was… startling.”

The General closes his eyes, as everything within him, the man he thought he was  - principled, measured, honorable – slips through his grasp.

“I see,” his voice sounds alien, hollow.

“It is my understanding that, pertaining to your, ah-  _species_ , an omega such as Lady Hux is considered-  marriageable at the age by which she presents-”

Both men understand what the good doctor means by _marriageable._ The General’s insides twist waiting for the other boot to fall.

“However,” Branson presses on with his dubious, halting damnations, “in my own _medical_ opinion, such a delicate girl- with her history- is, well- wholly unsuited at this age for certain- ah, martial duties.”

A sick sensation strikes and grounds like lightning in the General's gut. With detachment, he wonders if he’ll vomit.

He considers his reflection in the curved glass of an empty chamber. “You think I’m a monster.”

“No sir,” here, in this singular moment, the doctor shows a spark of spine, “I think the laws concerning your species are antiquated, and barbarous. I think you believed what you were doing was right.”

Somehow, it is worse than a condemnation.

His mind projects a hundred different pictures onto the glass, moments with her he’s saved forever in his heart. Of her lying on the living room floor on her belly, elbows propped, feet cycling slowly through the air, drawing his portrait in colored pen on linen paper. Of her naked and budging her way into his showers just to press herself against his chest, holding his shoulders as she stands on her tiptoes to peck away the water from his face. Of her pretending to smoke with him as they play cards, drawing on her imaginary cigarette so hard her cheeks hollow then blowing air up at the ceiling through her pursed mouth. Of her wild, maniacal laugh, head thrown back, hands on her belly.

“I do love her,” he whispers. His eyes sting. He lowers them unblinking to the floor.

“I have no doubt,” says Branson. He sounds as if he’s speaking from systems away.

The General takes a breath. Then another. He draws his shoulders back. Lifts his head. The coolness of his stare makes the doctor flinch.

“So what is the solution?” he drawls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It takes himself and two med drones to hold her down to the table for her suppressant. She rakes his arm and kicks Branson in the gut so hard he’s winded and has to pause to catch his breath.

“My darling hold still,” the General shouts, traitorous tears leaching from the corners of his eyes and falling down into her face, “You’ll hurt yourself-”

She squeezes her eyes and strains so hard against his hold her face turns red and the tendons in her neck stand out.

“ _No-”_ she screams with all her heart, “ _No don’t please don’t no no no-”_

“It’s just a small injection,” the doctor calls over her keening. He is panting nearly as hard as she is, “You’ll feel a slight pinch-”

“Get on with it,” the General snarls, struggling to hold her without hurting as she thrashes and bucks.

When the needle bites her arm, she makes a sound like he’s never heard before. Or maybe it is his heart, cleaving apart.

Her mouth hangs open in a silent scream, she stays suspended between breaths until she draws in a ragged, shuddering sob. She cannot stop sobbing afterwards, as Branson swobs up the prick of blood and melds the needlepoint closed with bacta graft. Not when the General gathers her up off the gurney into his arms like a bride, like a child, and sways softly with her, shushing and soothing her in a cracked, wavering murmur. She only hides her face in his chest and cries like she’ll never, ever stop.

He shouldn’t have let Branson tell her the suppressant would stop her heat cycle. That she would not heat again for a year.

He should not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doctor Branson assures him the long, sightless, unblinking stare is a side effect of the tranquilizer.

 _"Perfectly harmless,”_ he said, as he escorted them to the elevator bay outside the infirmary. _“It will wear off in a few hours, rest assured.”_

What the General is entirely unsure of is whether her heartbreak ever will.

“Are you comfortable, darling?” he sets her tea on the coffee table and retucks the light blanket that’s slipped from her lap in around her. “Are you warm enough? Can I bring you anything, do anything? Rey?”

She has not spoken to him since the infirmary. When they came home, he set her down on their bed to draw her a soothing bath. He came back into the bedroom to find her on her hands and knees in front of his open closet, staring devastated at the crisp rows of dark, pressed shirts and slacks and uniform coats.

RM-BA had removed their nest, upon his request. To wash out the blood.

Her tea betrays his anxiety, trembling in its saucer as he lifts them to offer her some comfort. The steam is warm and fragrant, steeped in honeycomb.

She stares over its rim at the carpet and does not move.

Desperate, he retreats to their room to retrieve-

“Look, my darling. Look whom I have here-”

He holds the velveteen ewok level to her eyes and makes it salute. “General Paddington wishes to see you. He wants to know if you’re alright.”

He makes the doll prance in her lap and do a jig.

She blinks slowly and sighs. “He’s a doll, stupid. He don’t have feelings.”

Her tone is empty, seething. She looks him in the eye. “Like you.”

White lights pop in his field of vision. He reels as if she’s slapped him in the face.

“Bad Alpha,” she snarls, fists trembling in her blanket. Tears streak down her flushed, round cheeks. She snatches up the ewok and hurls it.

It thuds dully against the wall and falls to the floor.

“Rey,” he starts calmly. She is a child. She is wounded. She does not understand.

He tries to take her hands, “I know you are very angry with me. That I’ve spoiled everything. I am deeply sor-”

“Chut up!” she snaps. This time, she does slap him. _Hard._

He blinks rapidly, nose stinging, and chokes the lightning-flash impulse to strike her back. Instead he takes deep, centering breaths as his heart thrashes and she continues to rail.

“I hate you!” she shrieks, slapping and scratching and kicking him where he kneels motionless at her feet. Her face is red and ugly with grief, she is quaking with rage, “I’m _not_ your wife- I hate you and I won’t never love you again! Go ‘way, go to work! Now, Ahm’tage, _go-_ ”

_Very well then._

How he stands so calmly, so gracefully, when she has eviscerated him, he cannot be sure.

“Where are you going?” she half-snaps, half-begs him as he bends elegantly to the coffee table to retrieve his leather gloves.

“To work,” his voice is even, despite the roiling in his chest where his heart might have been once. Before he burned all of his happiness to ash. “As you’ve asked me to.”

“No-” her voice cracks. Her tiny hands, so small and white from her captivity, away from fresh air and sun, reach up and clutch his uniform coat. They wring him, as if to draw him down.

He takes them delicately and uncurls them. His voice is barely audible, even to his own ears. “I’m afraid I must. RM will look after you.”

She pulls her hands out of his slight grasp as if he’s cut her. They curl protectively against her breasts, over her heart.

She’s looking at him like she’s never seen him before. Like she fears him.

It makes him want to go, to flee her and his failure. He feels suddenly as if he’s suffocating. On their own, his feet move him towards the door.

“You’re _bad_ ,” her warbling, breathless words slow his stride. They break his charcoaled heart. But he does not stop. He would rather face a thousand riots, solve a hundred riddles with the fate of the Order and of the Galaxy dangling in the balance, than face this moment with her now.

What will happen to them, he does not know.

He does understand, however, that if he is not in the launch bay in next twenty minutes to prepare for his departure, his Supreme Leader will send a Praetorian guard to break his bitch’s neck, and make him watch. Leader Snoke rarely keeps his promises, but he _always_ puts paid to his threats.

Her sobbing follows him all the way to the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lissen - we knew it had to get bad before it could get better. Didn't we...


	9. the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Classic Pastel, up to her usual fuckery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe a HUGE shoutout on this chapter to the stunning, amazeballs AlbaStarGazer. Babe - if you love Reylo and a fast, furious, engrossing read - GO. GO TO HER WORKS PAGE *NOW*.
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlbaStarGazer
> 
> She writes the *best* phone/skype/long-distance/masturbation sex I have EVER read, and this is my ridiculous unsolicited Rux love letter to her epic ass.
> 
> Alba, you rule the school and I love you forever.
> 
> Oh, and also-
> 
> READ THE TAGS!

_Two months ago…_

For the one billionth time that evening, she read the little steel chronometer above the sleek kitchen stove.

_Twenny more minutes._

Her excitement rose bright and tingling inside her chest.

Ahm’tage had already been gone six hours. That was forever in marriage time. He’d left her behind to look after Roomba and the ‘partment while he went to the Core worlds to fight crime. She offered to go with him – she was magnifible with a quarterstaff and spoke basically every language in the Galaxy. Common tongue, binary, cusswords… Besides, she knew Roomba wouldn’t mind.

But her Alpha insisted, _“An urban warzone is no place for kitlings. Especially not one so precious as mine.”_

So she stayed home and waited. And waited. And waited more.

 _Fifteen more minutes,_ the chronometer said.

She was sure that was close enough.

“Roomba,” she instructed it with a gentle shake of her finger, the way her Alpha did when he made her promise not to climb chairs, “you wait here in the livin’ room and don’t get into any trouble. If you get hungry, have a snack.”

 _“Wheep-beep-woo,”_ it chirped back, revolving its little black body like a nod.

She pecked its infrascanner then skittered into the bedroom.

Intersystem communication emission systems, or _ICES_ , were problemful pieces of machine. Installed mostly into bolted-down terminals or companion droids, you were _supposed_ to sit or stand in front of them while you talked to whoever it was you called.

Really uncomforting when you’re fully naked.

Which is why she had ripped their unit from the terminal in Armitage’s office and rigged it to the ceiling above their bed. It wasn’t difficult. She’d once done the same thing with half the tools under a blazing midday sun having eaten hardly a crust of bread. Today she’d had four snacks and two lunches and taken a break halfway through the installation to have a nap in her Alpha’s closet on top of his clothes.

She _did_ have loads of trouble getting the holoprojector up into the soffit beside the intake lens, so instead she propped it on a chair she dragged to Armitage’s side of the bed.

Which meant, if she’d done everything correct-like, he would see her laid out on the bed and himself in blue holoform standing over her, and she would see only him.

_Perfect._

She stripped out of her pale pink angel-dress, the one she’d seen him off in this morning before he left. Holding his face between her two hands as she rode his lap desperately, lips touching, her long tulle skirt gathered round her waist like soft-crackling foam. Breathing each other’s breath as he filled her aching little cunny to bursting. Her pink kitten tongue deep inside his wide, sensual mouth.

She wanted him to smell like her for his work trip. Her glands and her perfume and her sex. She wanted all the other unmarriaged kits to know-

_My Alpha. Touch him, and I’ll break your stupid little neck._

Now she was dressed in just a pair of lace panties the same blush color as her dress and a set of white satin stockings with bows at the top hem, her hair long and loose and tumbling down her shoulders over her naked breasts. She tied a soft pink ribbon round her throat into a bow before she laid in the center of the big bed she shared with her Alpha and folded her knees over the edge so that her small white feet dangled down.

Even now, on his pillow, she could scent his gland and his cologne.

It made her heart beep inside her throat.

“ICES,” she called up to the comm unit. Her mating gland throbbed, “Call Ahm’tage.”

Its dotted white lights cycled as it dialed, _trinkaloo… trinkaloo_...

Excitement thrummed low in her belly and pattered at her heart.

“General Hux,” her Alpha answered sternly after the third trinkle. A moment after, his blue holoform poured flickering from the eye of the projector and came to life at the edge of the bed.

He wasn’t dressed in the sleek regimentals and greatcoat he almost always wore to work. He was wearing the full field gear of an elite soldier, a black polywoven tactsuit that molded to his long, strong body and showed off the mean breadth of his chest and shoulders narrowing down to the sharp V of his hips. His high, tight collar was made of dark flexsteel, the forearms of the suit were bladed and ended in a pair of black leather gloves. Strapped over his shoulders were the holsters for his custom-coded blast guns. His laserblade rapier was holstered at his hip.

It was ‘xactly the way he was dressed the day he found her - the day he killed Master Plutt and burned down Niima and claimed her for life.

Her heart shook, she traced the edge of her teeth with her tongue as slowly her eyes drifted fluttering from his fierce-looking boots all the way up his towering body, to where his blue holo face loomed above hers, cold and bright as the Jakku moon.

He made her feel melted and drunk.

“Alpha,” she breathed, pulse pounding in her pussy. Her little rose-tipped breasts rose and fell with her soft panting, she gushed a hot, wet rush of slick onto the bedspread and moaned.

“ _Well,”_ her Alpha’s cool blue gaze made so much more ‘lectric by the projector glinted hungrily. He raked his eyes down her sweet, fragile body the way the big lizards on Jakku watched their prey.

_Yes Alpha, eat me up_

“What have we here?” he asked softly.

Playing shyful, she cupped one little hand over her plump, smooth sex and crossed the other over her breasts like an angel. She tucked her cheek against her shoulder before she whimpered, “I loss my clothes.”

“Did you, now?” his lips twitched into a brief quarter-smile.

She loved that, when she could make her Alpha almost laugh.

Tucking even closer to her shoulder, she batted her lashes slowly and she traced her pink bottom lip with her thumb as she nodded. “Yes, Alpha. I was playing with all my dresses but then I loss them in the closet. Then it was time to call you and I didden want to be late.”

“Oh I see. How very thoughtful of you,” her Alpha’s eyes kept wandering everywhere over her body, lingering on her warm breasts and sweet belly, her softly rounded thighs and the little bow tied at her throat. “Is RM-BA with you now?”

She trembled a little at his timber. It was the rumbly one, like the broil of thunder and the threat of a sandstorm, the one he used when he thrust his big cock too deep and told her in her ear to thank him.

“Nm-no,” she whispered.

“Good girl,” his praise poured over her like soft velvet dragged slowly down her naked body, “I don’t want anyone to see you like this. Not even the droid. This is for my eyes, only.”

Her eyes rolled softly behind her fluttering lids and her belly clenched and she whimpered. Her hand cupping her mound squeezed like it had a mind of its own, making her aching clit jump and her poor lonely cunny gulp out more slick.

“I promise you, Ahm’tage, I promise,” she panted, anxious and aching and needing needing _needing_ , “I’m a good girl-”

“Shh, I know, I know. It’s alright, sweet one,” though his voice was coming from the modulator, it felt as if he spoke from inside her heart, “Look at you, so precious. You like to please me, don’t you, my love?”

_My love._

“Yes,” she was almost crying. She _loved_ her Alpha, so so much. “I want to please you o’ways…”

“Show me your pretty cunt.”

Her eyes opened and she startled, gaze going sweetly wide and shimmering with hot tears on the surface at how much closer her Alpha had come. His holoform stood directly in front of her, her sex ached for him to reach down and peel open her soft white thighs.

It was overwhelming, seeing him dressed how he was the day he found her. So big and so mean and so dark. With his beautiful ice-moon eyes and hair like true fire. Her heart frighted a thousand times since he took her - whenever she was alone - thinking how easily he could have never met her. Or if he had and then decided he could never love her at all.

As if he could read her mind from a star system away through the hologram, he called to her, so tender and deep-

“My adored one. Look at me.”

She abs’lutely did

“Have I frightened you, little one?”

“No,” her lip trembled. Hot tears streak like falling stars down her flushed, rounded cheeks. “I m-miss you, Ahmt’age. Badfully. I know it’s stupid and that I’m complainly-”

“No, not at all,” how can he can do that, smile so sweetly and look like love and death all at the same time, “I miss you, Rey-”

Just his voice saying her name made goosepimples along her flesh.

_I love him._

“So terribly much. I feel as if I’ve been walking in a dream without you,” he leaned over her. On his side, far away, there must have been a console set with a lens he could brace on.

But it _felt_ like his soul was really with her, that he was caging her in with his silvery-blue body against the bed. She felt sheltered. Looked after.

_Noticed._

“When I saw you, just moments ago,” his eyes traced tenderly the lines of her face, “it was as if I had awoke.”

“I love you,” she pressed her body up to touch his image, wishing more than anything she had the prettiful words to tell him how perfect he made her feel.

“I love you, sweet girl,” his timber rumbled again, like a world shaking way down in its heart. His blue eyes roamed down her throat to her bow and then lower, to her tiny rose-tipped nipple peeping shyfully above her arm. “You are a vision. What a fool I am to leave such a pretty little wife as mine.”

Her lashes still wet and sparkling flickered, she blushed softly prickling all the way down to her chest.

“Can I still show you?” she whispered and chewed her lip, hoping very much he still wanted her to.

“Your little pussy?” his voice made her shiver, his eyes were all mercury and liquid mirth.

She held her breath and nodded, feeling her heart beating up against her ribs to peek him.

“Oh yes,” his gaze raked down her body, “Show me _everything.”_

She swallowed, feeling throbbing and timid and wild and greedful.

“I wanna see you too,” she breathed.

Her words hardly made a sound, but their effect on her Alpha was instant. His chest swelled closer to her and he smiled, showing all his big, bad teeth. “You want to see my cock, little girl?”

Her gland with their imprint _burned_ for his bite as she nodded. “An’ your knot.”

“Show me your pussy first.”

Tentatively, she spread her thighs beneath him. Her skin made a hushed sound on the bedspread as she did.

The small pink lips of her sex were plump and sensitive, she whimpered softly as one of her fingertips teased her slick little seam.

“Yes,” her Alpha hissed, unblinking. With a powerful flex of his biceps, he lifted his body so that he was braced above her on the length of his arms and bowed his head so he could watch.

It was eerie, the way she could see him and see through him all at once.

Her beautiful ghost.

“Are you a shy baby tonight, my sweetheart?” his deep bass roiled through her belly.

She shook her head, too breathless to make words.

“Then open wider,” he crooned to her, a dark lullaby she wanted to swaddle in, “show Alpha where his cock goes.”

Her poor nerves fireworked, she started to tremble so bad she could barely stand it as her quivering fingertips coaxed her little pussy apart.

“Rey,” his sharp intake of breath breathed lightning into her. She felt electric, fizzling-soft.

Gently, she touched the hot wet slick round her sensitive opening, jolting at the good-feeling ache before she slipped just the tip inside.

“Alpha,” she mewled arching beneath his holoform, “please fuck me here with your cock.”

Her big Alpha _snarled._

She mewed back up at him, as her used little cunt gulped her finger down to the quick.

“Good baby kitling,” his praise sparkled all along her skin and tingled her scalp, “now, add the others. That’s it. Stretch that little cunny out-”

She struggled to obey him, not because her slick dribbling out of her tiny pink opening onto the bedspread wasn’t enough to prepare her. Because it was.

It was the ache in her soft, raw walls as she stuffed herself, the shape of her four fingers so very different from the thicker, fatter column of her Alpha’s smooth marble cock. It hurt and it didn’t hurt her enough.

“No Alpha,” she whimpered, eyes wet again, “it’s too much.”

“Shh, you can take it,” she could almost _feel_ his soft breath on her face, soothing her the way he did when he forced in his knot, “go slowly, my love. Slowly. Touch yourself, like Alpha does.”

She shuddered. This – _this –_ her Alpha telling her, _making her,_ gentle but firm, was everything.

_Everything._

She ached to please him. To do it _perfect._

She caught her kitten tongue between her teeth and slowly – so slowly – she nudged up her hips just a touch to help her fingers sink in to the root.

“Yes, now touch,” he coaxed her.

Her thumb stretched up and strummed her clit.

“Oh! Uhn… _ahn_ ,” she quaked at the sensation, stretched and filled and needy, just like when he mounted her.

“ _There_ we are. Isn’t that better, my dove?” His soothing gravel brushed down the line of her spine like silk fur, “Doesn’t Alpha know best?”

“Yes Alpha,” she panted, thighs shaking, tummy creased with folds as she started to fuck herself on her fingers while he watched.

Their bedroom was drowning in the sounds of her wet pussy and the scent of her sex and her glands.

Quietly, he told her, “Touch your breasts.”

She did, reveling in the ache that tugged from her small pebbled nipples all the way to her bellybutton. Her eyes fluttered shut as she pinched and pulled gently like her Alpha did with his teeth.

“Yes, good girl- just like that…”

Just the memory of his head dipped over her breasts, bright hair glinting, gold lashes and long, straight nose leading down to his lips around her pink flesh, made her hips buck and her cunny tighten.

She whimpered and suckled her tongue and whined, “Alpha it’s too sore.”

“Good,” he chuffed above her. His shoulder was jerking, she looked down the length of his holoform still braced on one hand above her and saw where his huge fist was wrapped tight around his big fat shaft.

He was pumping furiously, fast and vicious, like the way he loved her when he was close.

 _“Ahn…”_ she whimpered. It made her savage seeing her man like that, fisting his cock over her naked body while he told her what to do to. He was still wearing his tactsuit, having dragged his cock and his hot, heavy sack through the slit in his pants. She could picture it beautifully – him bending her over the seat of her speederbike the day they met, being tender of her broke pride and bruised up arm as he fucked her like an animal under the pleased leer of the Jakku sun.

The kiss of hot metal on her naked back as he took her against her hovel, outside and outloud, letting everyone hear her pussy slosh for him and her whining baby cries – _please Alpha more harder it’s too big I can’t please don’t never stop –_

Oh she wished he was really here so she  could fall on her knees and worship him. She wanted to choke on his big cock and let him smear his come on her cheeks and into her hair. She wanted to lie on her back like a good little bitch with her knees to her chest and take him. Take him down to the knot and let him fill her up till it hurt.

She loved him so much she could _scream._

“That’s it, come for me, little one,” he was rasping above her, lips wet and glistening even through the projector as he slavered to bite the gland in her soft neck and catch her sobbing on his knot, “good Rey, my baby… sweet little wife… come on Alpha’s big cock-”

He was right, it wasn’t her fingers in her cunny making her ache so much. It was him, big and veined and menacing and beauty, goodness and shelter and safety and love-

“Love you, my darling. Let me- fuck, let me hear you come.”

“Ahm’tage-” her head tipped back. Her toes dangling down the side of the bed tingled and curled until they cracked. She folded deeper, reaching, fucking fast, working her clit with her thumb-

_Love me love me love me love me please love I love-_

_“Ahm’tage!”_ she wailed as the sparkling ‘lectric light inside her pussy and her belly wound too tight and then burst. She whiplashed, unraveled. Her hot slick gushed and coated her to her wrist as she sang.

She was coming, coming, comping apart. _“Ahm’tage-!”_

“Oh God-” he groaned.

He bowed over her, head hanging, panting and watching her through the strands of hair in his eyes as he wrenched at his cock. His voice darkened, it spooled graveled and thin like the walls of her cunt between his lips as he told her, “So fucking beautiful… _look at you, Rey-”_

Her breath shook, her heart fluttered. Shyfully, she curled in her shoulder and tucked her cheek against her loosely-closed hand. Her other still sluiced slowly in and out, in and out of her tight, sensitive pussy, drawing out in greedful waves her good pleasure-

More than anything else in the whole wide Galaxy, she got off on watching her Alpha love her back.

“Oh angel,” he whispered, so close to knotting. She could see it in the creases of his long, dangerous face, “ _My baby_ … sweet baby… wanted you since I- _fuck-_ ”

More fringe fell down into his eyes, shaken loose from its sharp-lipped style by his mean thrusts. She lifted her hand from her cheek to brush them before she remembered they weren’t really _real._

“Tell me you love me,” he rasped.

“I do, Ahm’tage, I love you-” her little body strained quaking, even her bones tried to tell him, to make him _understand-_

_There was nothing before Alpha. Nothing._

He is the only thing she’s ever loved.

“Ahm’tage!” she bleated.

His head hung, he gritted his teeth and stretched the tendons in his neck as he came.

 

 

 

After the glow went away a bit and she could speak again, they talked while he cleaned himself up. He spoke softly as he asked about the ‘partment, if Roomba was behaving himself, if she was eating good, if she was lonesome. If it was scary being in a new place all by herself. He said he hated that he had to leave her so soon after the wedding, that he had to work so much, that his job meant he had to go ‘way. He said he hoped he didn’t still feel too strangerly to her, that she getting used to him, that she liked her new home. He said they could spend more time together after the riots were over.

He said he loved her, and he wanted her to be happy. More than anything. Most of all.

 _Silly Alpha,_ she wanted to giggle at him. Didn’t he know that all her life she’d been alone? That on Jakku, she worked her fingers till they bled just for a spoonful? That already, her heart had died and she had buried it in the sand?

Until the day he found her and kept her.

He was the one who brought her back to life.

 

 

 

 

_Now…._

The gentle _trinkaloo_ of the _ICES_ unit in Armitage’s office is the only sound in their empty apartment. It tinkles softly, like the chime of a faraway bell. Spaced evenly, it calls to her for the count of seven.

Then always, his voice comes after.

_Alpha._

Winding from the unit to their bedroom and slipping quiet – ever so quiet – through the sliver in his closet door.

_“Rey, my angel. I know you can hear me. I know that you’re there-”_

She curls deeper into the nest she’s made herself of his dress shirts and uniform trousers. Cradling General Paddington between her chin and her knees drawn up to her chest.

Her ribs ache from sobbing, the suppressant is like a dark, cold hand pressing down on her all over. It’s changed her, slowed her thinking, ruined her scent.

She’s not an omega anymore. She’s not Rey.

She’s not anything at all.

 _“Please my love, come to the projector. I need to see you. We don’t have to speak if you don’t want to. Or you can speak and I’ll listen, I won’t say a word. I just_ need _to know that you’re alright, and that there’s a chance that I- Please, Rey. I won’t stop calling-”_

“Shh,” she shushes Paddington, rocking and holding him tight. He’s crying into her neck because he knows that, once Ahm’tage finds out her scent is ruined and her brain is stupid, he’ll throw Paddington away with her too.

“It’s alright, Paddy,” she tries to sound brave, she tries not to sob. She can’t hear what her Alpha is saying anymore, her tears run into her ears and crackle too loud. “I still love you and we’re gonna be alright…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Rey, my love. Can you hear me?”

The General stands with hands braced against the sleek, dark surface of their compact shuttle, eyelevel with the intake lens inside its exterior comms panel. It’s blistering hot, he is sweltering inside his black tactsuit and all along his scalp beneath his sharp black cap. Over his shoulder, Canto Byte’s suns beam in quintuple formation, aligned in a cascade and surrounded by a corona of blinding white. Their light reflects off the shimmering mirrored surface of the ocean’s clear blue waters, it bleaches the shore to glimmer and gilds the tops of the lush forests gold.

It also bakes the curved surface of the shuttle, so much so that the bite from the heat through his gloves to the heels of his hands distracts him from the ratcheting cinch around his heart. The pain in his breast has grown steadily worse over the two days he spent apart from his wife in transit to Canto. It is as if he’s just taken a fresh syringe of antiserum – his pulse pounds wildly, his breathing is shallow and high in his chest.

Only now he feels a throbbing in his left arm he can’t quite explain. His gums itch, he finds himself running his tongue along his upper teeth behind his closed lips and lingering over his canines. His core feels strong and weak at the same time.

And he has a _raging_ erection.

_Constantly._

“Come to the projector, my darling. I know you’re there. This has gone on long enough, don’t you think? Rey,” he murmurs her name into the speech grate below the intake lens. Just the _sound_ of it makes him harder, help him God, “my love. _Please_ speak to me. I need to see you. I-”

Covertly, he glances over at the crash site of the Sith’s Imperial ship where Phasma and their field team are working, only a few yards away. Ren’s ship lies smashed and scattered across the rock crag in pieces, like a glass globe thrown down among black stones. The damage is extraordinary, too extensive for a mere fall through the atmosphere. It has kept them all flummoxed and, thankfully, too busy to eavesdrop on the General’s frequent private calls.

It is humiliating enough excavating a site for evidence with an obvious and aggressive hard-on. He does not need his subordinates listening in while he begs his pretty little bitch to take him back as well.

His _wife,_ as he begs his pretty little _wife-_

“I need to look into your eyes and tell you that I’m sorry – so sorry – and that,” he steps closer to the panel and drops his timber, “I love you. So much.”

His chest pinches painfully. He shuts his eyes.

He can picture her so readily, tiny hand safe and sound in the crook of his arm as she skips the seams in the corridor. Fretting over whether she’s made his sandwich just right. Preening him, constantly. Her soft, warm weight inside his lap as she runs her small fingers slowly through his hair.

Her feet dangling sweetly and swaying as he carries her sleeping from their play to their bed.

His beautiful bride.

A dull pain throbs down his left arm and in his cock and at his hindbrain. He grits his teeth and rests his forehead on the panel and does not let it show in his voice. “I made a terrible mistake with Doctor Branson, I realize that. I will do _anything_ -”

“General?”

His hackles stand on-end.

He closes the call abruptly with a sharp rap of the heel of his hand against the panel. He whirls around seething and showing teeth _._

 _“What,_ Lieutenant, is your emergency?” he snarls.

Lieutenant Mitaka salutes trembling to attention. His oily little face glistens with sweat. “Sir, my apologies, sir! We fo-found the black box, sir!”

“I see,” the General nods curtly at the wreck site over the Lieutenant’s shoulder, squinting against the menacing glare of the suns, “And your fear is what, exactly? That it will spontaneously sprout a pair of wings and fly away?”

The Lieutenant’s face pinches, as if he has to think _very carefully,_ “N-no sir?”

“Ah,” the General stacks his hands behind his back smartly. His _other_ roiling just beneath the surface relishes when the sharp gesture makes the beta male jump, “then can you tell me, First Lieutenant Mitaka, what is so _compelling_ about the situation that you deemed it necessary to interrupt an urgent, critical communique to Base?”

The boy’s eyes grow wider and wider, he works his lips like a fish and shudders, but the only sound that comes forth is a soft, pitched _squeak_.

“General-”

The casual call is from his Captain, she stands a few yards away with one chrome hand propped on her hip and helmet in the other.

“Don’t shoot my messenger,” her cool, ironic tone carries across the dark crags sparkling with mica flecks beneath the suns. “Or you’ll owe me a new one.”

“-more competent one, perhaps-” he growls below his breath as he shoulders past the terrified Lieutenant to make his way over the rocks to the Captain.

“Dismissed,” he tosses back.

The Captain’s armor gleams like a beacon, blindingly bright against the backdrop of dark volcanic rock and Imperial ship fragments and beneath the beat of the quintuple suns.

“An urgent, critical communique to Base, was it?” she waits until they are out of range of the rest of his subordinates and walking shoulder-to-shoulder through the ravage towards the largest fragment of the ship before addressing him smirking, “Heavens, is the ship burning down?”

“No, just my personal life,” he drawls, trying to mop his brow with the unforgiving armored bands on his forearm. He is _soused_ in sweat, it beads out of every pore and drips stinging into his eyes. It collects along his spine and trickles uncomfortably down the cleft of his ass, chaffing his undergarments against his swollen, sensitive sac.

“What, did she lose one of her dollies?” the Captain teases.

 _She lost everything,_ he thinks bitterly as he wrenches off his cap.

Growling, he rakes his long fingers through his drenched, wilted hairstyle and ignores her question entirely, sending a narrow glare instead to the domed casinos dazzling in the distance against the heliotrope sky. “Pray, what kind of madman builds a gambling retreat on Hades?”

His Captain reaches for a crisp white cloth slung over her chrome shoulder and passes it to him. “The guests sleep during the daylight hours and come out at night.”

“You mean they’re vampires,” he grouses as he scrubs vigorously around his eyes.

“It’s called _a life of leisure,_ General. It’s how their kind live.”

“By their kind, I assume you mean alcoholics, degenerates and adulterers,” finally, they reach the fragment of the shipwreck that holds the black box and alt their march.

He mops more at his face with the cloth as his Captain watches him coolly from beneath her lashes. The terry has a vague, clinical smell and is immaculately white. It leaves a cooling sensation when he’s finished.

Odd she should have something like it with her-

A sudden breeze breathes inland from the harbor, carrying with it the scents of kelp and salt. It tickles the canopy of the nearby forest, making the trees whisper like coconspirators. It tingles gloriously along his damp, overheated scalp.

“You know,” his Captain tips her head so that her slash of ice blonde hair slips out of the way of her smirk, “I rather thought rut would make you less of a prig.”

He snorts venomously. “Think again.”

Sparing another baleful glance at his erection burgeoning against his tactsuit, he hunkers down as best he can around it to inspect the fragment at hand.

His face prickles unbearably in the heat. He gives it another wipe with the cloth.

“My life is… a hellscape… of my own design,” he ducks and tilts his head, trying to squint now through the gleam of sunlight prisming off the surface of the panel. His vision, normally sharp thanks to his adaption, seems to be worsening by the second. His face feels completely numb.

His Captain stands behind him, he can sense she is oriented over the hardscape to where their Imperial transporter waits.

“Come now, Huxy,” she says over her shoulder, one of his men shouts something in the distance he cannot discern. “It can’t be _all_ that bad.”

The black box is set inside the ship’s interior paneling – its emergency latch looks like it has soldered shut.

_Curious…_

His heart is beats too loudly, it thuds sluggishly against his chest, slowed way down from its rapid-fire tattoo only moments before. His left arm pounds, pulse dancing in his fingertips. A bad sign, though he cannot remember why.

Actually, he feels rather dulled.

His other sluices whispering beneath the surface of his skin as his fingers slot into the inset and to begin to pry.

“It’s the ship log alright,” he sounds disoriented, out-of-breath. Another one of his men shouts to him, but he is distracted by how suddenly his hands have begun to shake, “but it- it appears to be- corroded. It’s as if… someone’s… doused it in acid almost. Do you see?” he gasps.

“The first year is always the hardest,” his Captain speaks as calmly, as if they are taking tea in his quarters. The way they used to, before he was a married man. “Until my girls synced their heat cycles, I thought I’d go mad-”

Something thunders in the distance, a boom that startles and scatters the birds nesting all along the trees.

_Blast shot._

One of the men near their transporter screams.

On his knees before the ship fragment, the General closes his eyes and tips up his face at the blue-bleeding-amethyst sky and lets the pieces kaleidoscope into place.

“You poisoned me,” he reaches slowly, blindly, shaking violently, for the cloth he slung over his shoulder. He can hardly catch his breath as he rasps, “Clever witch.”

The suns of Canto are in a circle all around him, pressing in on him as she kneels behind him and reaches around for his coded blast guns in their holsters. He hears the _click_ of his rapier leaving his swordbelt, but he can’t _quite_ lift his left arm.

“Sorry, old cock,” she says by his ear, “You were always my first choice for Supreme Leader. But-”

His eyes flicker helplessly behind their lids as a ship pierces shrieking through the atmosphere.

It roars towards them as she stands. “He has the crime families in his back pocket, and well- it’s become a sort of tradition, hasn’t it? A Sith as Galactic Emperor-”

Ah, so the Sith has come to kill him, then.

_This is how I die._

“Anyway, Huxy. You would have been bored on the throne.”

“ _My wife_ -” is all he can rasp before gravity shifts and he’s take sideways down to the ground.

“Oh don’t worry,” her voice is fading now, “you’ll see her very soon.”

With a blinding flash of acid light, their transporter explodes.

The blowback rips over them, it swells his eardrums and sweeps away whatever the Captain speaks next into her wrist comm. Above them, a second ship is whirring its anti-thrusters as it prepares to land.

None of it makes an impression, because his soul is collapsing like the heart of the dying star. He wants to sob out but he can’t draw breath, his lungs are compacting themselves inward, his throat is sealed shut by grief.

_They killed my darling girl._

“You were right, Armitage,” Phasma’s voice finds him before he vanishes with the tears that slip through his lashes into the dark void. “We cannot go on as we are.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well well well, it's been a little minute, hasn't it? I missed you, baby. Did you miss me : >
> 
> Leave a comment or a kudo and lemme know <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my style, would like to learn more about me, or want to be friends, please find me on Tumblr at :
> 
> https://royramsey.tumblr.com/
> 
> Your comments and kudos are loved and adored.


End file.
